#472 – Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI
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The following is a conversation with Terence Tao, widely considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians in history, often referred to as the Mozart of math. He won the Fields Medal and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, and has contributed groundbreaking work to a truly astonishing range of fields in mathematics and physics. This was a huge honor for me, for many reasons, including the humility and kindness that Terry showed to me throughout all our interactions. It means the world. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfriedman.com slash sponsors. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Notion for teamwork, Shopify for selling stuff online, NetSuite for your business, Element for electrolytes, and AG1 for your health.
Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. They're all here in one place. I do try to make them interesting by talking about some random things I'm reading or thinking about. But if you skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. I use Notion for everything, for personal notes, for planning these podcasts, for collaborating with other folks, and for super boosting all of those things with AI because Notion does a great job of integrating AI into the whole thing. You know, what's fascinating is the mechanisms of human memory before we had widely adopted technologies and tools for writing and recording stuff, certainly before the computer.
So you can look at medieval monks, for example, that would use the now well-studied memory techniques, like the memory palace, the spatial memory techniques to memorize entire books. That is certainly the effect of technology started by Google search and moving to all the other things like notion that we're offloading more and more and more of the task of memorization to the computers, which I think is probably a positive thing because it frees more of our brain to do deep reasoning, whether that's deep dive focused specialization or the journalist type of thinking versus memorizing facts. Although I do think that there's a kind of background model that's formed when you memorize a lot of things.
And from there, from inspiration, arises discovery. So I don't know. It could be a great cost to offloading most of our memorization to the machines. But it is the way of the world. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. Our future, friends, has a lot of robots in it. Looking into that distant future, you have Amazon warehouses with millions of robots that move packages around. You have Tesla bots everywhere in the factories and in the home and on the streets and the baristas.
All of that. That's our future. Right now, you have something like Shopify that connects a lot of humans in the digital space. But more and more, there will be an automated, digitized, AI-fueled connection between humans in the physical space. Like a lot of futures, there's going to be negative things and there's going to be positive things. And like a lot of possible futures, there's little we could do about stopping it. All we can do is steer it in the direction that enables human flourishing. Instead of hiding in fear or fear-mongering, be part of the group of people that are building the best possible trajectory of human civilization. Anyway, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex.
That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. There's a lot of messy components to running a business.
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