A conversation with Max Tegmark as part of MIT course on Artificial General Intelligence. Video version is available on YouTube. He is a Physics Professor at MIT, co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, and author of "Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence." If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. My name is Lex Friedman. I'm a research scientist at MIT. This podcast is an extension of the courses on deep learning, autonomous vehicles, and artificial general intelligence that I've taught and organized. It is not only about machine learning or robotics or neuroscience or philosophy or any one technical field.
It considers all of these avenues of thought in a way that is hopefully accessible to everyone. The aim here is to explore the nature of human and machine intelligence, the big picture of understanding the human mind and creating echoes of it in the machine. To me, that is one of our civilization's most challenging and exciting scientific journeys into the unknown.
I will first repost parts of previous YouTube conversations and lecture Q&As that can be listened to without video. If you want to see the video version, please go to my YouTube channel. My username is Lex Friedman there and on Twitter. So reach out and connect if you find these conversations interesting.
Moving forward, this podcast will be long-form conversations with some of the most fascinating people in the world who are thinking about the nature of intelligence. But first, like I said, I will be posting old content, but now in audio form.
For a little while, I'll probably repeat this intro for reposted YouTube content like this episode, and we'll try to keep it to what looks to be just over two minutes, maybe 2.30. So in the future, if you want to skip this intro, just jump to the 2.30 minute mark. In this episode, I talk with Max Tegmark.
He's a professor at MIT, a physicist who has spent much of his career studying and writing about the mysteries of our cosmological universe. and now thinking and writing about the beneficial possibilities and existential risks of artificial intelligence. He's the co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, author of two books, Our Mathematical Universe and Life 3.0.
He is truly an out-of-the-box thinker, so I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you do as well. Do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe? Let's open up with an easy question.
I have a minority view here, actually. When I give public lectures, I often ask for a show of hands who thinks there's intelligent life out there somewhere else. And almost everyone puts their hands up. And when I ask why, they'll be like, oh, there's so many galaxies out there. There's got to be. but I'm a numbers nerd, right? So when you look more carefully at it, it's not so clear at all.
When we talk about our universe, first of all, we don't mean all of space. We actually mean, I don't know, you can throw me in the universe if you want, it's behind you there. We simply mean the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us so far during the 14.8 billion years, 13.8 billion years since our Big Bang.
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Chapter 2: How does Max Tegmark view the existence of intelligent life in the universe?
They're always going to be zombies. You never have to feel guilty about how you treat them. And then there's a third group of people, including Giulio Tononi, for example, and another, and Christoph Koch and a number of others. I would put myself on this middle camp who say that actually some information processing is conscious and some is not.
So let's find the equation which can be used to determine which it is. And I think we've just been a little bit lazy, kind of running away from this problem for a long time. It's been almost taboo to even mention the C word in a lot of circles. But we should stop making excuses. This is a science question. And there are ways we can even test any theory that makes predictions for this.
And coming back to this helper robot, I mean, so you said you'd want your helper robot to certainly act conscious and treat you like...
have conversations with you and stuff i think so but wouldn't you would you feel would you feel a little bit creeped out if you realized that it was just a glossed up tape recorder you know there was just zombie and a sort of faking emotion would you prefer that it actually had an experience or or would you prefer that it's actually not experiencing anything so you feel you don't have to feel guilty about what you do to it it's such a difficult question because uh
You know, it's like when you're in a relationship and you say, well, I love you. And the other person says, I love you back. It's like asking, well, do they really love you back? Or are they just saying they love you back? Don't you really want them to actually love you? It's hard to really know the difference between...
everything seeming like there's consciousness present, there's intelligence present, there's affection, passion, love, and it actually being there. I'm not sure.
Can I ask you a question about this? To make it a bit more pointed. So Mass General Hospital is right across the river, right? Yes. Suppose you're going in for a medical procedure. And they're like, you know, for anesthesia, what we're going to do is we're going to give you muscle relaxants so you won't be able to move.
And you're going to feel excruciating pain during the whole surgery, but you won't be able to do anything about it. But then we're going to give you this drug that erases your memory of it. Would you be cool about that? What's the difference that you're conscious about it or not if there's no behavioral change, right?
Right. That's a really clear way to put it. That's... Yeah, it feels like in that sense, experiencing it is a valuable quality. So actually being able to have subjective experiences, at least in that case, is valuable.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the Fermi paradox in this context?
You give it some goal that seems completely harmless, and then... before you realize it, it's also trying to do these other things which you didn't want it to do. And it's maybe smarter than us. So it's fascinating.
And let me pause just because I am in a very kind of human-centric way, see fear of death as a valuable motivator. So you don't think...
you think that's an artifact of evolution so that's the kind of mind space evolution created that we're sort of almost obsessed about self preservation at some kind of genetic level you don't think that's necessary to be afraid of death so not just a kind of sub goal of self preservation just so you can keep doing the thing but more fundamentally sort of have the finite thing like this ends for you at some point
interesting do i think it's necessary for what precisely for intelligence but also for consciousness so for those for both do you think really like a finite death and the fear of it is important so
Before I can answer, before we can agree on whether it's necessary for intelligence or for consciousness, we should be clear on how we define those two words because a lot of really smart people define them in very different ways. I was on this panel with AI experts and they couldn't agree on how to define intelligence even.
So I define intelligence simply as the ability to accomplish complex goals. I like your broad definition because, again, I don't want to be a carbon chauvinist. Right. And... In that case, no, certainly it doesn't require fear of death. I would say AlphaGo, AlphaZero is quite intelligent.
I don't think AlphaZero has any fear of being turned off because it doesn't understand the concept of it even. And similarly, consciousness, I mean, you can certainly imagine...
very simple kind of experience if certain plants have any kind of experience I don't think they're very afraid of dying there's nothing they can do about it anyway so there wasn't much value but more seriously I think if you ask not just about being conscious but maybe having what you would we might call an exciting life where you feel passion and really appreciate the
things, maybe there perhaps it does help having that backdrop that, hey, it's finite. Let's make the most of this. Let's live to the fullest. If you knew you were going to just live forever, do you think you would change your
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Chapter 4: How can AI assist in solving global challenges?
And it does everything that you would have done and improvises and stuff. That would, in my mind, involve a lot of creativity.
Yeah, so it's actually a beautiful way to put it. I think we do try to grasp at the definition of intelligence is everything we don't understand how to build. So we as humans try to find things that we have and machines don't have. And maybe creativity is just one of the things, one of the words we use to describe that. That's a really interesting way to put it.
I don't think we need to be that defensive. I don't think anything good comes out of saying, oh, we're somehow special. Contrary wise, there are many examples in history of where trying to pretend that we're somehow superior to all other intelligent beings has led to pretty bad results, right? Nazi Germany, they said that they were somehow superior to other people.
Today, we still do a lot of cruelty to animals by saying that we're so superior somehow and they can't feel pain.
Chapter 5: What are the potential risks and benefits of AGI?
Slavery was justified by the same kind of really weak arguments. And I don't think if we actually go ahead and build artificial general intelligence, we can do things better than us. I don't think we should try to found our self-worth on some sort of bogus claims of superiority in terms of our intelligence.
I think we should instead find our calling and the meaning of life from the experiences that we have. I can have very meaningful experiences, even if there are other people who are smarter than me. when I go to a faculty meeting here and we're talking about something and then I suddenly realize, oh, he has an old prize, he has an old prize, he has an old prize. I don't have one.
Does that make me enjoy life any less or enjoy talking to those people less? Of course not. And the contrary is I feel very honored and privileged to get to interact with other very intelligent beings that are better than me at a lot of stuff. So, I don't think there's any reason why we can't have the same approach with intelligent machines.
That's a really interesting. So people don't often think about that. They think about if there's machines that are more intelligent, you naturally think that that's not going to be a beneficial type of intelligence. you don't realize it could be, you know, like peers with Nobel prizes that would be just fun to talk with.
And they might be clever about certain topics and you can have fun having a few drinks with them.
Well, also, you know... Another example we can all relate to of why it doesn't have to be a terrible thing to be in the presence of people who are even smarter than us all around is when you and I were both two years old, I mean, our parents were much more intelligent than us, right? Worked out okay. Because their goals were aligned with our goals.
And that, I think, is really the number one key point. issue we have to solve. The value alignment problem, exactly. Because people who see too many Hollywood movies with lousy science fiction plot lines, they worry about the wrong thing, right? They worry about some machine suddenly turning evil. It's not malice that is the concern, it's competence. By definition,
Intelligent makes you very confident. If you have a more intelligent Go playing, computer playing is the less intelligent one. And when we define intelligence as the ability to accomplish Go winning, right? It's going to be the more intelligent one that wins.
And if you have a human and then you have an AGI that's more intelligent in all ways, and they have different goals, guess who's going to get their way, right? So I was just reading about this... particular rhinoceros species that was driven extinct just a few years ago. Bummer, I was looking at this cute picture of a mommy rhinoceros with its child. Why did we humans drive it to extinction?
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Chapter 6: How should we approach the future of AI and human collaboration?
There's the technical value alignment problem of figuring out just how to make Machines understand our goals, adopt them and retain them. And then there's the separate part of it, the philosophical part, whose values anyway? And since it's not like we have any great consensus on this planet on values, what mechanism should we create then to aggregate and decide, okay, what's a good compromise?
That second discussion can't just be left to tech nerds like myself, right? That's right. And if we refuse to talk about it, and then AGI gets built, who's going to be actually making the decision about whose values? It's going to be a bunch of dudes and some tech company. And are they necessarily? so representative of all of humankind that we want to just entrust it to them?
Or are they even uniquely qualified to speak to future human happiness just because they're good at programming AI? I'd much rather have this be a really inclusive conversation.
But do you think it's possible sort of, so you create a beautiful vision that includes sort of the diversity, cultural diversity, and various perspectives on discussing rights, freedoms, human dignity, But how hard is it to come to that consensus? Do you think it's certainly a really important thing that we should all try to do, but do you think it's feasible?
I think... There's no better way to guarantee failure than to refuse to talk about it or refuse to try. And I also think it's a really bad strategy to say, okay, let's first have a discussion for a long time. And then once we reach complete consensus, then we'll try to load it into some machine. No, we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. Instead...
We should start with the kindergarten ethics that pretty much everybody agrees on and put that into our machines now. We're not doing that even. Look at, you know, anyone who builds a passenger aircraft wants it to never, under any circumstances, fly into a building or a mountain, right? Yet the September 11 hijackers were able to do that.
And even more embarrassingly, you know, Andreas Lubitz, this depressed German wings pilot, when he flew his passenger jet into the Alps, killing over a hundred people, He just told the autopilot to do it. He told the freaking computer to change the altitude to 100 meters. And even though it had the GPS maps, everything, the computer was like, okay.
So we should take those very basic values, where the problem is not that we don't agree. The problem is just we've been too lazy to try to put it into our machines and make sure that from now on, airplanes will just... which all have computers in them, but we just refuse to do something like that. Go into safe mode, maybe lock the cockpit door, go over the nearest airport.
And there's so much other technology in our world as well now where it's really coming quite timely to put in some sort of very basic values like this. Even in cars, we've had enough vehicle terrorism attacks by now where people have driven trucks and vans into pedestrians that it's not at all a crazy idea to just have that hardwired into the car.
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Chapter 7: How does Tegmark define consciousness from a physics perspective?
And I don't think it's just communication problems.
As far as we know.
I don't think it is. It can do it.
Although Buddhists say when they watch the water that there is some beauty, there is some depth and beauty in nature that they can communicate with.
Communication is also very important though because, I mean, look, part of my job is being a teacher and I know some very intelligent professors even who are just have a better hard time communicating. They come up with all these brilliant ideas, but to communicate with somebody else, you have to also be able to simulate their own mind.
Yes, empathy.
Build well enough and understand model of their mind that you can say things that they will understand. And that's quite difficult. And that's why today it's so frustrating if you have a computer that makes some cancer diagnosis and you ask it, well, why are you saying I should have a surgery? And if it can only reply, I was trained on five terabytes of data and this is my diagnosis.
Boop, boop, beep, beep. Doesn't really instill a lot of confidence, right? Right. So I think we have a lot of work to do on that.
On communication there. So what kind of, I think you're doing a little bit of work in explainable AI. What do you think are the most promising avenues? Is it mostly about sort of the Alexa problem of natural language processing, of being able to actually use human interpretable methods of communication?
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