Max Tegmark is a physicist and AI researcher at MIT, co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, and author of Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Notion: https://notion.com - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off - Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit EPISODE LINKS: Max's Twitter: https://twitter.com/tegmark Max's Website: https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark Pause Giant AI Experiments (open letter): https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments Future of Life Institute: https://futureoflife.org Books and resources mentioned: 1. Life 3.0 (book): https://amzn.to/3UB9rXB 2. Meditations on Moloch (essay): https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch 3. Nuclear winter paper: https://nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (07:34) - Intelligent alien civilizations (19:58) - Life 3.0 and superintelligent AI (31:25) - Open letter to pause Giant AI Experiments (56:32) - Maintaining control (1:25:22) - Regulation (1:36:12) - Job automation (1:45:27) - Elon Musk (2:07:09) - Open source (2:13:39) - How AI may kill all humans (2:24:10) - Consciousness (2:33:32) - Nuclear winter (2:44:00) - Questions for AGI
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
The following is a conversation with Max Tegmark, his third time on the podcast. In fact, his first appearance was episode number one of this very podcast. He is a physicist and artificial intelligence researcher at MIT, co-founder of Future of Life Institute, and author of Life 3.0, Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
Most recently, he's a key figure in spearheading the open letter calling for a six month pause on giant AI experiments like training GPT-4. The letter reads, we're calling for a pause on training of models larger than GPT-4 for six months. This does not imply a pause or ban on all AI research and development or the use of systems that have already been placed on the market.
Our call is specific and addresses a very small pool of actors who possesses this capability. The letter has been signed by over 50,000 individuals, including 1,800 CEOs and over 1,500 professors. Signatories include Joshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Harari, Andrew Yang, and many others.
This is a defining moment in the history of human civilization, where the balance of power between human and AI begins to shift. And Max's mind and his voice is one of the most valuable and powerful in a time like this. His support, his wisdom, his friendship has been a gift I'm forever deeply grateful for. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Notion for project and team collaboration, Insight Tracker for biological data, and Indeed for hiring. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, speaking of hiring, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring, whether it's through Indeed or otherwise, go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads.
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of the open letter regarding AI development?
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Like I said, everything is just so easy to play around with and all of it, no matter what you're doing, will challenge you to think differently. how you write. It will challenge you to expand the style of your writing. It will save you a lot of time, of course, but I just think it makes you a better thinker and productive being in this world.
And I think that's such a great integration of AI into the productivity workflow. To me, it's not enough for a large language model to be effective. at answering questions and having good dialogue. You have to really integrate it into the workflow. And Notion, better than anybody else I've seen, has done that.
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It's really good to do that kind of thing regularly, to look at all the different markers in your body and to understand what could be made better through lifestyle, through diet changes. It's kind of obvious that decisions about your life should be made based on the data that comes from your own body. Not some kind of population study, although those are good.
Not some spiritual guru, although those are good. Not some novel, whether it's Harry Potter or Dostoevsky, although those are sometimes good. Not your relative who says, I heard a guy say that a guy does this thing that is very bro-souncy sounding, although sometimes it turns out to be pretty effective.
Overall, the best decisions about your life should be based on the things that come from your own body. Inside Tracker uses algorithms to analyze your blood data, DNA data, fitness tracker data, all that kind of stuff to give you recommendations. You should be doing it. You should be doing it regularly.
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Chapter 3: How does Max Tegmark describe the responsibility of humanity in AI development?
what I really want to say about what's important in life is the people you surround yourself with. And we spend so much of our time in the workplace seeking solutions to very difficult problems together, passionately pursuing ambitious goals, sometimes impossible goals, That is the source of meaning, a sort of happiness for people.
And I think part of that happiness comes from the collaboration with other human beings. The sort of professional depth of connection that you have with other human beings. Being together through the grind and surviving and accomplishing the goal or failing in a big epic way. knowing that you have tried together.
And so doing that with the right team, I think, is one of the most important things in life. So you should surround yourself with the right team.
Chapter 4: What are the potential consequences of AI on human civilization?
If you're looking to join a team, you should be very selective about that. Or if you're looking to hire a team, you should be very selective about that and use the best tools of the job. I've used Indeed many, many times throughout my life for the teams I've led. Don't overspend on hiring. Visit Indeed.com slash Lex to start hiring now. That's Indeed.com slash Lex. Terms and conditions apply.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Max. Tag Mark. You were the first ever guest on this podcast, episode number one. So first of all, Max, I just have to say thank you for giving me a chance. Thank you for starting this journey. It's been an incredible journey.
Just thank you for sitting down with me and just acting like I'm somebody who matters, that I'm somebody who's interesting to talk to. And thank you for doing it. That meant a lot.
Thanks to you for putting your heart and soul into this. I know when you delve into controversial topics, it's inevitable to get hit by what Hamlet talks about, the slings and arrows and stuff. And I really admire this. It's in an era, you know, where YouTube videos are too long and now it has to be like a 20-minute TikTok video. 20-second TikTok clip.
It's just so refreshing to see you going exactly against all of the advice and doing these really long-form things and that people appreciate it. You know, reality is nuanced. And thanks for sharing it that way.
So let me ask you again the first question I've ever asked on this podcast. Episode number one, talking to you, do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe? Let's revisit that question. Do you have any updates? What's your view when you look out to the stars?
So when we look out to the stars, If you define our universe the way most astrophysicists do, not as all of space, but the spherical region of space that we can see with our telescopes from which light has the time to reach us since our Big Bang, I'm in the minority. I estimate that we are the only life in this spherical volume that has invented internet radios, gotten our level of tech.
And if that's true, then it puts a lot of responsibility on us to not mess this one up. Because if it's true, it means that life is quite rare. And we are stewards of this one spark of advanced consciousness, which if we nurture it, then... help it grow, eventually life can spread from here out into much of our universe and we can have this just amazing future.
Whereas if we instead are reckless with the technology we build and just snuff it out due to stupidity or infighting, then maybe the rest of cosmic history in our universe is just gonna be a play for empty benches. But I do think that we are actually very likely to get visited by aliens alien intelligence quite soon. But I think we are gonna be building that alien intelligence.
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Chapter 5: How does AI's optimization relate to capitalism?
And eventually, you're going to be leaving the solar system. Yeah. And they proved it. It's beautiful mathematical proof. This happens generally. And this is very important for AI. Because even though Stuart Russell has... written a book and given a lot of talks on why it's a bad idea to have AI just blindly optimize something. That's what pretty much all our systems do.
We have something called the loss function that we're just minimizing or reward function we're just maximizing. And capitalism is exactly like that too. We wanted to get stuff done more efficiently than people wanted. So we introduced the free market. Things got done much more efficiently than they did in, say, communism, right? And it got better.
But then it just kept optimizing and kept optimizing. And you got ever bigger companies and ever more efficient information processing and now also very much powered by IT. And... Eventually, a lot of people are beginning to feel, wait, we're kind of optimizing a bit too much. Why did we just chop down half the rainforest? And why did suddenly these regulators get captured by lobbyists and so on?
It's just the same optimization that's been running for too long. If you have an AI that actually has power over the world and you just give it one goal and just keep optimizing that, most likely everybody's going to be like, yay, this is great in the beginning. Things are getting better. But it's almost impossible to give it exactly the right direction to optimize in.
And then eventually all hay breaks loose, right? Nick Bostrom and others have given examples that sound quite silly. Like, what if you just want to tell it to cure cancer or something, and that's all you tell it? Maybe it's going to decide to... take over entire continents just so we can get more supercomputer facilities in there and figure out how to cure cancer backwards.
And then you're like, wait, that's not what I wanted, right? And the issue with capitalism and the issue with runaway AI have kind of merged now because the Moloch I talked about is exactly the capitalist Moloch that we have built an economy that is optimizing for only one thing, profit. And that worked great back when things were very inefficient and then now it's getting done better.
And it worked great as long as the companies were small enough that they couldn't capture the regulators. But that's not true anymore, but they keep optimizing. And now they realize that these companies can make even more profit by building ever more powerful AI, even if it's reckless, but optimize more and more and more and more and more.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of AI on job automation?
So this is Moloch again showing up. And I just want to, anyone here who has any concerns about late stage capitalism having gone a little too far, you should worry about super intelligence because it's the same villain in both cases. It's Moloch.
And optimizing one objective function aggressively, blindly is going to take us there.
Yeah, we have to pause from time to time and look into our hearts and ask, why are we doing this? Am I still going towards Austin or have I gone too far? Maybe we should change direction.
And that is the idea behind the halt for six months. Why six months? It seems like a very short period. Can we just linger and explore different ideas here? Because this feels like a really important moment in human history where pausing would actually have a significant positive effect.
We said six months because we figured the number one pushback we were gonna get in the West was like, but China, And everybody knows there's no way that China is going to catch up with the West on this in six months. So that argument goes off the table and you can forget about geopolitical competition and just focus on The real issue. That's why we put this.
That's really interesting. But you've already made the case that even for China, if you actually want to take on that argument, China too would not be bothered by a longer halt because they don't want to lose control even more than the West doesn't.
That's what I think.
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Chapter 7: How does consciousness factor into AI development?
That's a really interesting argument. I have to actually really think about that, which the kind of thing people assume is if you develop an AGI, that open AI, if they're the ones that do it, for example, they're going to win. But you're saying, no, everybody loses.
Yeah, it's going to get better and better and better, and then kaboom, we all lose. That's what's going to happen.
When lose and win are defined in a metric of basically quality of life, for human civilization and for Sam Altman.
Both. To be blunt, my personal guess, you know, and people can quibble with this, is that we're just gonna, there won't be any humans. That's it. That's what I mean by lose. You know, if you, we can see in history, once you have some species or some group of people who aren't needed anymore, doesn't usually work out so well for them, right? Yeah.
There were a lot of horses that were used for traffic in Boston, and then the car got invented, and most of them got, you know, we don't need to go there. And if you look at humans, you know, right now, why did the labor movement succeed after the Industrial Revolution? Because it was needed.
Mm-hmm.
Even though we had a lot of Molochs and there was child labor and so on, the company still needed to have workers. And that's why strikes had power and so on. If we get to the point where most humans aren't needed anymore, I think it's quite naive to think that they're going to still be treated well.
You know, we say that, yeah, yeah, everybody's equal and the government will always protect them. But if you look in practice, groups that are very disenfranchised and don't have any actual power usually get screwed. And now in the beginning, so industrial revolution, we automated away muscle work.
But that worked out pretty well eventually because we educated ourselves and started working with our brains instead and got usually more interesting, better paid jobs.
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Chapter 8: What are the risks of AI in warfare?
But now we're beginning to replace brain work. So we replaced a lot of boring stuff, like we got the pocket calculator so you don't have people multiplying numbers anymore at work. Fine. There were better jobs they could get. But now GPT-4, you know, And the stable diffusion and techniques like this, they're really beginning to blow away some jobs that people really love having.
There was a heartbreaking article just posted yesterday on social media I saw about this guy who was doing 3D modeling for gaming and he... And all of a sudden, now that he got this new software, he just says prompts. And he feels this whole job that he loved just lost its meaning, you know. And I asked GPT-4 to rewrite Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in the style of Shakespeare.
I couldn't have done such a good job. It was really impressive. You've seen a lot of the art coming out here, right? So I'm all for... automating away the dangerous jobs and the boring jobs. But I think you hear some arguments which are too glib. Sometimes people say, well, that's all that's going to happen. We're getting rid of the boring, tedious, dangerous jobs. It's just not true.
There are a lot of really interesting jobs that are being taken away now. Journalism is going to get crushed. Coding is going to get crushed. I predict the job market for programmers, salaries are going to start dropping You said you can code five times faster, then you need five times fewer programmers.
Maybe there'll be more output also, but you'll still end up needing fewer programmers than today. And I love coding. I think it's super cool. So we need to stop and ask ourselves, why again are we doing this as humans? I feel that AI should be built by humanity for humanity. And let's not forget that. It shouldn't be by Moloch for Moloch.
What it really is now is kind of by humanity for Moloch, which doesn't make any sense. It's for us that we're doing it. And it would make a lot more sense if we... Build, develop, figure out gradually and safely how to make all this tech. And then we think about what are the kind of jobs that people really don't want to have, you know, automate them all away.
And then we ask, what are the jobs that people really find meaning in? Like maybe... taking care of children in the daycare center, maybe doing art, et cetera, et cetera. And even if it were possible to automate that way, we don't need to do that, right?
We built these machines. Well, it's possible that we redefine or rediscover what are the jobs that give us meaning. So for me, the thing, it is really sad. Like I... Half the time I'm excited, half the time I'm crying as I'm generating code because I kind of love programming. It's an act of creation.
You have an idea, you design it, and then you bring it to life and it does something, especially if there's some intelligence to it, it does something. It doesn't even have to have intelligence. Printing Hello World on screen, you made a little machine and it comes to life. And there's a bunch of tricks you learn along the way because you've been doing it for many, many years.
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