Lex Fridman Podcast
#373 – Manolis Kellis: Evolution of Human Civilization and Superintelligent AI
21 Apr 2023
Manolis Kellis is a computational biologist at MIT. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off EPISODE LINKS: Manolis Website: http://web.mit.edu/manoli/ Manolis Twitter: https://twitter.com/manoliskellis Manolis YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ManolisKellis1 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 (06:44) - Humans vs AI (15:50) - Evolution (37:34) - Nature vs Nurture (50:03) - AI alignment (56:27) - Impact of AI on the job market (1:08:06) - Human gatherings (1:13:07) - Human-AI relationships (1:23:11) - Being replaced by AI (1:35:37) - Fear of death (1:47:33) - Consciousness (1:54:58) - AI rights and regulations (2:00:41) - Halting AI development (2:13:52) - Education (2:19:16) - Biology research (2:26:36) - Meaning of life (2:29:09) - Loneliness
Chapter 1: What is the evolution of human civilization in relation to AI?
The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his fifth time on this podcast. He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group. He's one of the greatest living scientists in the world, but he's also a humble, kind, caring human being that I have the greatest of honors and pleasures of being able to call a friend. 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've got 8sleep for naps, NetSuite for business management software, ExpressVPN for privacy and security on the interwebs, and InsightTracker for biological data. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring.
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This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and its new Pod 3 mattress, which I think of as a teleportation device into a land of dreams, a place where the mind goes to escape the space-time physics of this reality of the waking world. Anything is possible in the place of dreams. The darkness that lurks in the Jungian shadow is possible.
The hope, the triumph, symbolized as the light at the end of the tunnel is possible. All of it is possible. It's all up to you. I'm kind of somebody that likes both the good and the bad of dreaming. There's a cleansing aspect of a bad dream. You wake up freaking out a little bit, but then you realize how awesome this life is, that whatever happened in the dream world is not real.
It's a kind of dress rehearsal for a bad event that happens in reality. But it doesn't. It's like in a video game. You get to save, do a dangerous thing, screw it up, and then you get to load and try again. That's what a dream is. Anyway, I love dreaming. I love sleeping. I love naps. And an 8sleep mattress is the best place to teleport into that dream world.
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Chapter 2: How does Manolis Kellis differentiate between nature and nurture?
It manages financials, human resources, inventory, e-commerce, and many business-related details, all things that I have to start figuring out. I put up a job position for somebody to help me with financials. All of it, I need so much help. Because running a business, any kind of business, whether it's a creative business or a robotics factory or anything,
any kind of AI software, anything you do has so many components. And I would say many of them don't involve any of the kind of cutting edge engineering and design and brainstorming and innovation and research and all that kind of stuff. You have to do all the basic minutia, the glue, that ties together people and makes the whole thing run. And I think you should use the best tools for that job.
And NetSuite is something I can definitely recommend as a great tool. You can start now with no payment or interest for six months. Go to netsuite.com to access their one-of-a-kind financing program. That's netsuite.com.
Chapter 3: What are the challenges of AI alignment?
This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. My comrade, my friend, the piece of software that has accompanied me through darkness and light for many years, way before I had a podcast, way before I have found my way, though I am still forever lost. And you, if you too are forever lost, perhaps it will also warm your heart as it did mine.
First of all, practically speaking, let's put the romantic stuff aside, you should be using a VPN on the internet. And ExpressVPN is the VPN I've used and can highly, highly, highly recommend. By the way, I apologize for the coarseness of my voice.
Chapter 4: How is AI impacting the job market?
I've been feeling a little bit under the weather. Whatever the heck that expression actually means. There's always Chad GPT that can ask the question, but I'm not going to. I'm just going to go with it. Going to wing it. Going to wing it is another funny expression, right? Wing it. What does that mean? Probably has to do with birds.
And the fact that bird flight is a kind of chaotic process that's not amenable to... clear, dynamical system modeling that, for example, an airplane is. But let us return to the piece of software you should be using to warm your heart and to protect your privacy on the internet.
Chapter 5: What role do human gatherings play in society?
Go to expressvpn.com slash lexpod for an extra three months free. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data that comes from my body. There's that song, It's My Party, and I'll Cry If I Want To. And I used to think it said, It's My Body, and I'll Cry If I Want To. I don't know what I thought that actually meant.
Chapter 6: How are human-AI relationships evolving?
But it's a good song. It's a silly song. It's my party and I'll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, cry if I want to. You would cry too if it happened to you. Anyway, speaking of which, we're going hard on the tangents today. I like data that comes from my body that is then used in machine learning algorithms to make decisions or recommendations of what I should do with said body.
lifestyle choices, diet, maybe in the future it'll be career advice, all kinds of stuff, dating, friends, anything, you know. But basically health stuff, medicine, I think, and that's the obvious way you should be figuring out what to do with your body, is at least in large part based on the data that comes from your body. And not just once, but many times, over and over and over and over.
Insight Tracker, pioneering the data collection, sort of the blood test, and then can extract all kinds of information, give you advice. I highly recommend them. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Manolis Kalas.
Good to see you, first of all, man. Flex, I've missed you. I think you've changed the lives of so many people that I know. And it's truly like such a pleasure to be back, such a pleasure to see you grow, to sort of reach so many different aspects of your own personality. Thank you for the love. You always give me so much support and love.
Chapter 7: What are the ethical considerations of AI rights and regulations?
I just can't, I'm forever grateful for that. It's lovely to see a fellow human being who has that love, who basically does not judge people. And there's so many judgmental people out there. And it's just so nice to see this beacon of,
So what makes me one instantiation of human irreplaceable, do you think? As we enter this increasingly capable age of increasingly capable AI, I have to ask, what do you think makes humans irreplaceable?
So humans are irreplaceable because of the baggage that we talked about. So we talked about baggage. We talked about the fact that every one of us has effectively relearned all of human civilization. in their own way. So every single human has a unique set of genetic variants that they've inherited, some common, some rare, and some make us think differently.
Some make us have different personalities. They say that a parent with one child believes in genetics. A parent with multiple children understands genetics. Just how different kids are. And my three kids have dramatically different personalities ever since the beginning. So one thing that makes us unique is that every one of us has a different hardware.
The second thing that makes it unique is that every one of us has a different software uploading of all of human society, all of human civilization, all of human knowledge. We're not born knowing it. We're not like, I don't know, birds that learn how to make a nest through genetics and will make a nest even if they've never seen one. We are constantly relearning all of human civilization.
So that's the second thing. And the third one that actually makes humans very different from AI is that the baggage we carry is not experiential baggage, it's also evolutionary baggage. So we have evolved through rounds of complexity. So just like ogres have layers and Shrek has layers, humans have layers.
There's the cognitive layer, which is sort of the outer, you know, most, the latest evolutionary innovation, this enormous neocortex that we have evolved. And then there's the emotional baggage underneath that. And then there's all of the fear and fright and flight and all of these kinds of behaviors. So... AI only has a neocortex. AI doesn't have a limbic system.
It doesn't have this complexity of human emotions, which make us so, I think, beautifully complex, so beautifully intertwined with our emotions, with our instincts, with our sort of gut reactions and all of that. So I think when humans are trying to suppress that aspect,
the sort of quote unquote more human aspect towards a more cerebral aspect i think we lose a lot of the creativity we lose a lot of the you know freshness of humans and i think that's quite irreplaceable so we can look at the entirety of people that are alive today maybe all humans who have ever lived and mapped them in this high dimensional space and there's probably a center of
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Chapter 8: How can education adapt to the rise of AI?
that every one of us has some kind of complex baggage of emotions intellectual you know motivational uh behavioral traits that um it's not just one sort of normal distribution we deviate from it there's so many dimensions that we're kind of hitting the sort of sparseness the the curse of dimensionality where it's actually quite sparsely populated and i don't think you have an average
So what makes us unique in part is the diversity and the capacity for diversity. And the capacity of the diversity comes from the entire evolutionary history. So there's just so many ways we can vary from each other.
Yeah, I would say not just the capacity, but the inevitability of diversity. Basically, it's in our hardware. We are wired differently from each other. My siblings and I are completely different. My kids from each other are completely different. My wife has, she's like number two of six siblings.
From a distance, they look the same, but then you get to know them, every one of them is completely different.
but sufficiently the same that the differences interplay with each other. So that's the interesting thing, where the diversity is functional, it's useful. So it's like we're close enough to where we notice the diversity, and it doesn't completely destroy the possibility of effective communication and interaction. So we're still the same kind of thing.
So what I said in one of our earlier podcasts is that if humans realize that we're 99.9% identical, we would basically stop fighting with each other. Like we are really one human species and we are so, so similar to each other. And if you look at the alternative, if you look at the next thing outside humans, Like, it's been six million years that we haven't had a relative.
So it's truly extraordinary that we're kind of like this dot in outer space compared to the rest of life on Earth.
When you think about evolving through rounds of complexity, can you maybe elaborate such a beautiful phrase, beautiful thought, that there's layers of complexity that make...
So with software, sometimes you're like, oh, let's build version two from scratch. But this doesn't happen in evolution. In evolution, you layer in additional features on top of old features. So basically, every single time my cells divide, I'm a yeast. I'm a unicellular organism. And then cell division is basically identical.
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