Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.
We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, I'm here with Judea Pearl. Judea, thanks for coming into the studio. Great to see you.
It's the second time, isn't it?
Yeah, I came to you last time. Yeah, I was in your office. I actually didn't look to see when that was, but that's a few years ago, certainly. That was for your book, The Book of Why.
The Book of Why.
Which kind of wraps up for a popular audience all of your work on causality. Correct, yeah. logic of that, which we'll touch briefly because I have to ask you about AI, given that you're one of the fathers of the field, but that's not really our agenda today, but we'll start near there. But I want to talk to you about your new book.
You have a new book, Coexistence and Other Fighting Words, which I'm sorry to say I have not yet read, but that will give you the ability to say anything to a naive audience on this topic.
I'm sure it covers much of the ground I want to cover with you because I'm, like you, I think, very concerned about cultural issues and the way that we've seen a rise of anti-Semitism on both the left and the right. And we're now seeing the condition of Israel as a near pariah state, you know, on the world stage. Briefly, let's start with your background.
Where were you born and what did your parents do?
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of AI on the future of AGI?
In Tel Aviv?
I went to a high school in Tel Aviv, yes. I grew up in Bnei Brak, but the municipality of Tel Aviv gave a quota to its peripheral, to its suburbs. And Bnei Brak was one of its suburbs. So from our town, they chose four people. I was chosen among them. It was a privilege at the time to go to a Tel Aviv high school. And we had a beautiful education. You know why?
Because my high school teachers were professors in Heidelberg and Berlin that were pushed out by Hitler. And when they came to Israel, they couldn't find academic jobs, so they taught high school. And we were just privileged and lucky to be part of this unique educational experiment.
Yeah, yeah. And your first language is Hebrew?
My first language is Hebrew. All the studies were in Hebrew.
So, but the people who had just come from Heidelberg, your professors were speaking Hebrew at that point? Hebrew.
Huh, interesting. They had to struggle. Some of them still had the Yakish accent.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so as I said, we spoke about your book of why last time where you talk about the importance of causal reasoning. What's your current view of AI? What has surprised you in recent years? How close to causal reasoning are we achieving in the current crop of LLMs? And I'm just wondering how you view progress at this point.
In causal reasoning or in toward the... I guess toward AGI in general. If that is a goal, I don't think we are much closer. We have been deflected by the effect of LLMs. You have low-flying fruits and everybody is excited, which is fine. I mean, they're doing a tremendously impressive job. But I don't think they take us toward AGI.
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Chapter 3: How does Judea Pearl's personal history influence his views on antisemitism?
Can you articulate the reason why in terms that a layperson can understand? I mean, if someone asked you, why is this insurmountable by virtue of just throwing more data and compute at it?
There are certain limitations, mathematical limitations, that are not crossable by scaling up. I show it clearly mathematically in my book. And what LLMs do right now is they summarize world models authored by people like you and me, available on the web. and they do some sort of mysterious summary of it, rather than discovering those world models directly from the data.
To give you an example, if you have data coming from hospitals about the effect of treatments, You don't fit it directly into the LLMs today. The input is interpretation of that data, authored by doctors, physicians, and people who already have a world model of body disease and what it does.
But couldn't we just put the data itself in as well?
Chapter 4: What are the connections between anti-Zionism and antisemitism?
Here you have a limitation. You have the limitation defined by the ladder of causation. There is something that you cannot do if you don't have a certain input. For instance, you cannot get causation from correlation. That is well established, okay? No one would deny even satisfaction by that. And you cannot get interpretation from intervention.
Interpretation means looking backward, doing introspection.
You say you can't get interpretation from interventions? But intervention is, just remind me, but it's... Intervention is what will happen if
Chapter 5: How has the cultural landscape shifted post-October 7th?
Right. So it's a kind of an experiment or a thought experiment.
Experiment, correct.
And also, doesn't it imply a kind of counterfactual condition where you're saying, you know, what would have happened if we didn't intervene? No. No? Here you have a barrier.
You have to have additional information to cross from the intervention level to the interpretation level.
And you'd put counterfactuals on the side of interpretation. Yes, correct.
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Chapter 6: What challenges does Israel face under Netanyahu's leadership?
Because you go, you say, look what I've seen, that David killed Goliath, and what would have happened had the wind been differently, okay?
So who among the other patriarchs in the field fundamentally disagrees with you? I mean, do people like Geoffrey Hinton or others who have...
I don't think they disagree. They don't address it. I haven't, well, Jeff Hinton came up with the statement that we are facing a deadlock.
Oh, I hadn't heard that, yeah. Yes, yes.
He mentioned that, that this is not the way to get AGI, but he didn't elaborate on the causal component.
Mm-hmm.
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Chapter 7: How can universities confront anti-Zionism effectively?
So I can't recall if we spoke about this last time, but where are you on concerns around alignment and an intelligence explosion? I mean, I know it sounds like you're not worried that LLMs will produce such a thing, but in principle, are you worried? Do you take IJ Goods and others' early fears seriously that
Once we build AGI on the basis of whatever platform, we're in the presence of something that can become recursively self-improving and get away from us.
Absolutely, yes. I don't see any computational impediments to that horrifying dream. And, of course, we're already seeing the dangers of LLM when they fall into the hands of bad actors. Mm-hmm. But that's not what you're worried about. You're worried about a truly AGI system that will take over and maybe a danger to humanity.
Chapter 8: What role does dialogue play in bridging cultural divides?
Yes.
Definitely foresee that possible. I can see how it can acquire free will and consciousness and desire to play around with people. Yeah. That is quite feasible. It doesn't mean that I'm going to stop working or understanding AI and its capability simply because I want to understand myself.
Yeah, yeah. Are you worried that the field is operating under a kind of a system of incentives, essentially an arms race that is going to select for reckless behavior? If there is this potential failure mode of building something that destroys us, it seems, at least from the statements of the people who are doing this work, you know, the people who are running the major companies,
the probability of encountering such existential risk is, in their minds, pretty high. I mean, we're not hearing people like Sam Altman say, oh yeah, I think the chances are one in a million that we're going to destroy the future with this technology. They're putting the chances at like 20%, and yet they're still going as fast as possible.
Doesn't an arms race seem like the worst condition to do this carefully?
There are many other people that are worried about it, like Stuart Russell and others. And the problem is that we don't know how to control it. And whoever says 20% or 5% is just talking. We cannot put a number there because we don't have a theoretical or technical instrument to predict whether or not we can control it. We do not know what's going to happen, what's going to develop.
But what I find alarming about those utterances is that, I mean, if you just imagine if the physicists who gave us the bomb, you know, the Manhattan Project, if one asked about their initial concern that it might ignite the atmosphere and destroy all of life on planet Earth, if they had been the one saying,
yeah, maybe it's 20%, maybe it's 15%, and yet they were still moving forward with the work, that would have been alarming. But of course, that's not what they were saying. They did some calculation and they put the chances to be infinitesimal, though not zero. It just seems bizarre culturally that we have the people doing the work who are not expressing
You know, fallaciously or not, I'll grant you that all of this is made up and it's hard to come up with a rational estimate, but for the people doing the work, plowing, you know, trillions of dollars into the build-out of AI to be giving numbers like 20% seems culturally strange.
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