SmartLess: "MIT Professor Max Tegmark: LIVE in Boston"

Hey, listener, and welcome to SmartList.

Before we get into this incredible episode,

I want just a moment of your time

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All right.

Welcome to SmartList.

This is officially a cold open, I guess.

This is a cold open.

Right?

This is like on the podcast, we just kind of talk

before we say what the name of it is.

It's like an intro, and then we've got to be like,

we've got to be like professional.

Yeah.

Oh, we usually just talk when I'm saying.

You're just talking when I'm saying.

You're just talking when I'm saying.

I don't know how to tap into this.

That's okay.

Just say the only thing that you know how to say.

Welcome to SmartList.

Smart.

Yes.

Smart.

Yes.

Smart.

Yes.

We're so happy to be in Boston.

We are so happy.

Thank you for being here tonight.

And you guys, you guys rolled out

your nicest weather for us.

Yeah.

Felt like being home in Canada almost.

But thank you, thank you, thank you,

not only for listening to our garbage,

but coming out and looking at our garbage.

That's a better way to say that.

There's a way for it.

That's a better way to say that.

So, all right, let's sit down.

So, oh wait, somebody left their phone here.

That's me.

I brought it, it's in my pocket.

I don't know why.

If I do get a call though,

we're just gonna take a quick break.

Okay, I'm expecting, it is mine.

Sorry.

The camera was on too, granddad.

Yeah, my flash was on.

Here, put it over here.

And I'm chewing gum.

It's a really professional operation here.

All right, so.

Let me ask you something.

Do you guys, how is traveling going for you

with all of this?

Great interview questions.

Sean did a little preparation, is that what?

No, I want to want to know that because

as of this morning, Will started calling me Katy Perry.

Well.

Because I bring so many outfits with me.

And this is the best you could use.

So, it was just, I know.

Well, the true story is the sweet girl

who picks out my clothes for me

because I don't know how to do that, clearly.

She sent me, she sent over, God love her,

she's a really close friend,

but she sent me over two of the exact same outfits today.

Right.

So, I kind of put this together willy-nilly.

It is a new thing for us because we,

you know, we do this thing on our laptops.

And we were.

No, we don't, we're together, we're together,

we're together.

We wear pajamas.

So, this whole notion of having to dress

and actually have a specific time and all that stuff,

it is odd.

And that there's people here.

Yeah, yeah.

And usually one of us is a few minutes late.

I am common, I am commonly late.

Oh, that's you.

I am.

Okay.

But here's it, I don't like to be,

if you're early, you've wasted time, right?

Do you, you have, you have an issue with?

No, I just, we got a lot of milling around going on there.

By the way, I'm interested.

I too, I go to a doctor's office now late

so I don't have to wait the 20 minutes they make me wait.

Right.

I just go, right?

By the way, you still have to wait.

But do they like that?

They love me for that.

This sounds familiar.

I feel like we talked about this, maybe.

I don't think we've ever talked about that.

I don't think we've ever.

I don't think we've ever.

I don't think we've ever.

You're never, you're never early or late, are you?

No, I'm right on time.

You're always right on time.

Yeah.

What is that?

Just because I have, just because I respect you.

Primarily.

The implication is I don't respect you.

Here's the other thing I discovered the other day.

Go, what were you gonna say?

Well, I was just gonna say about calling you Katy Perry.

It wasn't just that, I just kept going,

I don't know, ask Katy Perry over here.

Like that, so just bully.

And then we all have, you're gonna make me roar in her head.

Yeah.

And Jason, you've been singing that all day.

I can't, I'm so, I can't, is everybody,

when you get a song in your head,

you can't get it out, am I the only one?

But like, it lasts an abnormal amount of time,

like a week, I'll get something stuck on my head.

They say like to count down backwards

from a certain amount of number

and that will make you stop thinking of the,

are you doing it right now?

Does it just work for songs?

Yeah.

I should, I'd like to forget.

Like that kind of.

Yeah, so I would just, if that works, I wanna do that.

Well, the other thing that happened to me yesterday

was I found, my back has been itching

and then we have, we have this.

Wait, are you gonna get,

Yeah, so we have this.

He's backing into a plug

for a hypochondriac to his other podcast.

And, and, and.

So Sean, we're in conversations in the hotel room

and Sean does a lot of this, he's like, uh-huh,

what's going on?

And he gets up against the door and he's going, really?

Yeah.

Like the dogs.

Like non-stop.

Plug and scratches his.

Yeah.

So then we, our friend Eli's with us

and who we love and is a very good friend of ours.

And, and I'm like, what's going on with my back?

He goes, take your shirt off, let me see.

So I took the thing and I'm back and he goes,

that's shingles.

Truly?

Yeah, he said I have shingles.

Oh, were you not there?

No.

No, he went, oh my God, that's shingles.

And I'm like, what?

I just got the vaccine for shingles.

How could I have shingles?

Right.

Cause if there's a vaccine for it, it's in my body.

Yeah.

Right, huh?

Oh.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

Good, good health isn't political.

No.

Wow, say that again.

Thank you.

No, thank you.

You can get a shot.

Who's got a pen?

Yeah.

I used a pen earlier to write my, my intro.

And since we're talking about science,

it's a great segue.

Fellas.

All right.

I wanted to tap into the brain power of this city.

Okay.

We got a big brain coming out.

Uh-oh.

This fella has a master's and a PhD from Berkeley.

He's a fellow at Princeton.

He has tenure at Penn.

He arrived here at MIT in 2004, where he still works today.

He does it all from physics to cosmology

to quantum stuff and computers.

He's going to explain what it is.

Stephen Hawking.

Will Ferrell.

Stephen Hawking.

Please welcome a guy.

You can definitely make us all more smart,

not less smart.

Smart less, you get it?

Max Tegmark.

Oh!

What?

Max Tegmark!

Come on, Max.

Oh my gosh.

Get out of here.

There he is.

Max.

This is Max Tegmark.

How are you, man?

It's so nice to meet you.

Pleasure to meet you, sir.

Come on.

Please.

Please.

This is so exciting.

Well, see we have the same stylist.

Wow.

He wears a little better than you do.

He certainly does.

Now, can you do a better job than I just did

of explaining what it is that you do?

First of all, how do you introduce yourself?

Well, call yourself what you do.

By the way, you look like a rock star.

Well, it depends on what I want.

Like if I'm on a long flight

and I just want to be left alone,

the person asks me what I do.

Do you say you're a pedophile?

Physics.

That was my worst subject in my school.

Five hours of silence.

Right, right.

But you are a...

If I want to talk about astronomy,

I'm like, oh, I'm a Virgo.

Oh, nice.

Or maybe if I say cosmology,

they'll be talking about eyeliner and makeup.

Okay, so the class you teach is...

Oh, it's whatever they want me to torture

the students with that year.

So it can be either torturing the freshman

who came out of high school with the basic physics

of how stuff moves to torturing the grad students

with some advanced topics about our universe.

Okay.

Or most of my time,

I spend actually torturing my grad students

doing research on artificial intelligence.

Okay, okay, good.

By the way, this is everything I'm for.

Will you marry me?

No, I'm kidding.

I want it to go.

You probably have a bunch of stuff.

You'll have to ask my wife over there.

Well, that's...

I saw this documentary on artificial intelligence

and what I was surprised to learn

is that it's not about like robots

like the Steven Spielberg movie.

It's more about the amount of computing speed

that we now can do such that,

like I think they said in this documentary,

you can put all the books that have ever been written

into a computer now,

and you're gonna tell me whether I'm right or wrong.

I bet I'm close to right, but probably wrong.

You can put all the books into a computer

and the computer will ingest all that information,

separate it out, and be able to give you an answer

about anything that you can ask them

if the information was in any of those books

from languages to rocks to...

I mean...

Isn't that called Google though?

Well, I'm sure you could explain that,

but like that's artificial intelligence.

That's...

Well, yes and no.

So on one hand, yeah, you can take all the books

that have ever printed and put them on a memory card

so small that you might have a hard time

finding it in your pocket,

but that doesn't mean that a computer

necessarily understands what's there

just because it can store it

and kind of regurgitate it back to you, right?

And I think the truth is, despite the whole hype,

that artificial intelligence is still mostly pretty dumb

today compared to humans or even cats and dogs,

but that doesn't mean it's gonna remain that way.

I think a lot of people make the huge mistake

of thinking just because AI is kind of dumb today,

it's always gonna be that way.

Right, well, shouldn't we keep it dumb

because if we let it get too smart, et cetera,

what is that threshold, the point of no return?

Yeah, because remember that thing about Facebook

where they started, I don't know if this is true,

they started doing AI technology,

they just started talking to each other

and they shut it down, is that true?

Because they were gossiping.

Yeah.

It's true, but I think Hollywood

media often make us worry about the wrong things.

What do you mean, yeah?

First of all,

people often ask me if I,

we should fear AI or be excited about it.

The answer is obviously both, right?

AI is like any technology, it's not evil or good.

If I ask you, what about fire?

How do you feel, are you for it or against it?

What are you gonna say?

Right, it can hurt if you use it incorrectly.

Exactly, and the same thing with all tech.

The only difference is that AI is gonna be

the most powerful technology ever.

Because look, why is it that we humans here

are the most powerful species on this planet?

Fuckin' A.

Is it because we have bigger, yeah, bigger biceps,

sharper teeth than the tigers?

No, it's because we're smarter, right?

So obviously if we make machines

that are way smarter than us,

which is obviously possible,

and most researchers in the field think

it's gonna happen in our lifetime,

then it's either gonna, clearly,

either gonna be the best thing ever,

or the worst thing ever.

Yeah.

My question is, when it's the worst thing ever,

by the time it becomes the worst thing ever,

then we're fucked.

Then it's too late, yeah, you wanna kinda...

So let's not let it be the worst thing ever.

So that's the catch though, right?

We humans have had to play this game over and over again

with where technology got more powerful,

and we were trying to win this race,

making sure the wisdom with which you manage the tech

keeps pace with the power of the tech,

we always use the same strategy, learn from mistakes.

But it seems like the big safeguard

that we have as humans,

that we don't yet have with machines,

is that we have ethics, we have empathy,

we have emotion, and what is the computer program

that you would need to put together

to inject that into this new machine

with all of this information?

Can we put some snuggles in it?

Yeah.

That's a fantastic question.

What's the snuggle recipe?

So you're hitting exactly my wish list.

If you wanna have ever more powerful AI

that's actually beneficial for humanity, right?

So you can be excited, right on the horrified about the future.

There are three things you're gonna need.

First, you're gonna want to need the AI

to understand our human goals,

and then get it to actually adopt the goals,

and then to actually keep those goals as they get smarter.

And if you think about it for a little longer,

each of these are like really hard.

So suppose you have a,

you tell your future self-driving car

to take you to Logan Airport as fast as possible,

and then you get there covered in vomit

and chased by helicopters,

and you're like, no, no, no, no, that's not what I meant.

And the car goes like, that's exactly what you asked for.

You know, it's clearly lack of something.

See, they do talk like that.

Literally, literally, are you, he's the terminator.

He sounds like the terminator,

and he's talking about terminator stuff.

So we humans have so much more background knowledge, right?

That a machine doesn't,

because it's like a very alien species of a sort.

So that's hard for starters.

And then suppose you can get that right.

But let me stop you there.

Is there any chance of getting that right?

In other words, the formula, the equation,

that equals emotion, responsibility, ethics,

can you even create a computer equation for that?

I think right now, we don't know how to do it.

It's probably possible.

We were not working enough on it yet.

The catch is, though, computers are just like,

you know, if you think of a baby that's six months old,

you're not gonna explain the fine details of ethics to them,

because you can't quite get it yet.

By the time they're a teenager,

they're not gonna listen to you anymore.

Those of you who have kids out there, right?

So, but you have a window with human children,

while when they're small enough to get it,

and maybe still malleable enough to hopefully pay attention.

That's fascinating.

With computers, though, they might blow through that so quickly.

That window.

It makes it harder.

Did you see Ex Machina?

Did anybody see Ex Machina?

I did.

That's amazing.

That's amazing.

Let's give it up for Ex Machina.

No, no.

What is the most accurate film to science?

Like, is it Howe in 2001 or Ex Machina?

Those are my top two, actually,

because Howe emphasizes this key thing

that the thing you should really fear in advanced AI

is not that it's gonna turn evil,

but that it's gonna just turn really competent

and not have its gold aligned with yours.

That's what happens in Howe, like no spoilers.

Right.

And like that, actually, I mentioned.

60 years in, we're good, but...

But then the other thing you should also worry about is,

even if you can solve all these things,

and I think it might take 30 years to figure this out,

which is where we should start now,

not the night before some folks

on too much Red Bull switch and on.

I mean, I got two cans in me right now.

Not in the can.

Not in my can, but in two years.

Right, the super intelligence away from them.

But the other thing is,

even if you manage to solve those technical problems,

which we should have more research on,

you also have to worry about human society,

because just think for a moment about

your least favorite leader on the planet.

Don't tell me who it is,

so we don't offend anyone in the audience.

Thank you for thinking you're the leader.

Imagine their face for a moment here, okay?

And then imagine they are the one

who controls the first super intelligence

and take control over the whole planet and impose their will.

How does that make you feel?

Yeah, not good.

None of it makes me feel great.

Listen, after a lifetime of doing all this stuff with the run,

how does it feel to talk to an actual robot?

Like, that must feel...

And we will be right back.

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And now back to the show.

So is there, do people have proprietary right

over certain stuff or does one country control a lot?

Like who's leading?

China's leading the AI, are they not?

The U.S. and China are both very strong.

I mean, most research suggests

that it's U.S. is still kind of ahead,

but there's a lot of hype around.

Both countries, of course, try to...

If anybody's serving in the USA, I'm gonna lose it.

And I'll bet when they say the USA,

they're talking about MIT

and they're probably talking about him.

Well, you know how it goes.

Both countries are trying to claim that the...

Both countries, researchers are trying to claim

that the other one has the heads,

which you get more funding.

That's how we researchers always do it.

I got it.

But seriously, the interesting key here, I think,

is ultimately it's not really gonna matter

which country gets it first.

It's gonna matter most.

Is it gonna be us who control the machines

or are they who control us?

But it really is.

It's all joking aside.

I'm obsessed with the Terminator movies

and anything sci-fi.

Yeah, all joking aside.

Yeah, joking aside.

Yeah, let's put the jokes aside

and let's talk about it.

No, but that's kind of the idea

behind a lot of Hollywood movies and stuff.

Is that what if the AI has become more intelligent

than the human?

But here's the thing.

I saw something on 60 Minutes years ago

which fascinates me to this day

and I'm not gonna get this right,

but it's some guy with Andy Rooney's eyebrows.

That's it.

No, so, so I'm gonna be right back.

You ever wonder why?

You ever wonder why?

I opened my own desk drawer

and I got a tie from the 1968 Democratic Convention.

It's got soup on it.

I don't like soup.

I don't know.

Nobody knows who Andy Rooney is, does it?

I don't know.

Yeah.

It's also your, it's also his Dax Shepard impression.

But anyway.

I know it's true.

So.

So there is this guy, the interviewer was interviewing

the scientist who claimed to have come up with this idea.

This thing was like wrapped around his ear

and it was like tied to his side of his head.

And the interviewer was asking him a question,

like what's the population of Utah?

And all he had to do was think of the answer

and it popped up on the screen.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

This kind, yeah, well this sort of stuff

you can already do if you have a connection to Google.

Oh yeah.

Ergo, you saw it 15 fucking years ago.

What are you talking about?

No, no.

Sean.

No, but, no, but that you, can you hear me?

No, that you can, if you think of a response.

He got it.

Okay.

He heard you.

Answered it.

Let me move on to another question.

Something current.

So, you know, we were talking earlier about,

we're gonna kiss it out later.

What do you mean when you read out people's brainwaves?

Well, I found it fascinating.

I saw the segment where the guy was thinking an answer

and it popped up on the screen.

Again, I go, the third time is really clear.

Hey, Sean, your best robot voice, go, quick.

He's gonna sing Katy Perry.

Watch.

Do you want to play a game of war?

No.

Do you want to play six-tacto?

Another 15-year-old robot voice.

Do you want to play a game?

That's it.

He's seeing himself up.

This is the voice-over artist here.

Let's have it.

Do you want to play a game?

Okay, no matter how I say it, it's just the gayest

computer ever.

I'm sorry, Dave.

I tried to do that.

Do you want to play a game?

Like, yeah.

Okay, I'm sorry.

And what's your best computer voice?

I'm sorry, Dave.

I tried to do that.

I just love that house scene again.

It is great.

Because it points out what you really should worry about.

But coming back to, there are two things.

One, again, summarize why you need to make sure

the machines can actually align their goals with ours.

Yeah.

Because if you have something much smarter than us

that has other goals, we're screwed.

It's like playing chess today against the computer

that has a goal to win when you have, it's no fun.

What's the next, because when somebody says AI,

all I picture are those mechanical dogs that walk around.

And they don't really do anything.

They're just like, oh, look, we invented a robot dog

and it doesn't really do anything.

So I want to know, like, what's the next thing

that we can use that's like...

Is it mechanical cats?

Mechanical cats?

Yeah, you know what I mean?

Imagine the mechanical cats doing cats.

Oh, my God, that would be amazing.

Sorry, we'll get back to you.

You're saying what's the next thing

we can look forward to enjoying out of science?

Yeah, like in the pop sense.

Okay, in the pop sense.

So first of all, so just to finish off,

what are we talking about?

You know, Hollywood, it makes us associate

AI so much with robots and the Boston Dynamics dogs.

You should check them dancing, by the way, if you haven't.

Dancing dogs?

The Dancing Boston Dynamics robots.

Super cool.

But the biggest impact right now

AI is having is actually not robots at all.

It's just software, right?

I mentioned this, improvethenews.org project we're doing,

which is just a little academic thing,

but if you think about social media, that's all about AI.

One of the reasons people hate each other so much more

in America now is the effect of AI.

Not AI that had the goal of making people evil,

but just had the goal of making people

watch as many ads as possible.

But the AI was so smart,

figuring out how to manipulate people into watching ads

that it realized that the best way to do it

is to make them really angry

and keep showing them more and more extreme stuff

until they were so angry they wouldn't just fragment

and fill them up.

And if you get really, really pissed off,

you then research that thing even more

and then you get more ads and all that stuff.

Boom.

So that's one, all of social media, media.

Another one is, let's talk about some positive things

because AI, intelligence, right?

It's human intelligence that's given us everything

we like about civilization.

So clearly, if we can amplify it with artificial intelligence,

we can use it to solve all sorts of problems

we're stumped on now like cancer

and lifting everybody out of poverty and so on.

Will there ever be a...

Go ahead, sorry.

So I was just going to say,

another pure software thing that has nothing to do with bots

is use AI for doing better science,

better medical research, for example.

I was just going to ask about that.

So is there any...

I read a long time ago about...

You know, like you put a locator chip in your dog

or your cat, whatever.

I heard that they might be making a chip

with all your medical files and you put it under your skin

so you can just scan it

because filling out all those fucking forms

over and over, it's like...

I just filled out the form

and now you're asking me the questions all over again.

Read the thing, I just spent 20 minutes on it.

Stop talking to the doctor once a week.

I'm dying.

What?

Right, I'm like, what?

I was like, what's your name?

I just filled three forms out that says what my name is.

I think I'm personally going to pass on that chip implant

and just ask the hospital to have a less stone age computer system.

But seriously, of course...

Did you hear about Sean showing up to doctor's appointments late

so that he doesn't have to wait?

It's riveting.

I don't know if that's AI or whatever.

Something huge that happened this year, for example,

is biologists have spent 50 years trying to figure out

just from the DNA

how the shape is going to turn out to be

of different proteins that our bodies make.

It's called a protein folding problem.

And then Google DeepMind solved it.

No way.

Yeah, with an AI.

And now you can develop medicines faster.

So this is a fantastic example, I think, of AI for good.

Another one...

But then the robots that are probably going to have the biggest effect,

I think, on us and the job market the next five years

are probably cars, actually, just autonomous vehicles.

That's pretty cool.

I'm worried about everybody with their cars

and automatic driving or whatever,

and then they show up and then people are just going to show up

at the valet dead in their car.

And really, you know what I mean?

People are going to get in their car

and then they're going to be like, the pizza guy shows up

and he's like slumped over.

They'll open the door.

Yeah, just out.

You know what I mean?

That's what I'm worried about.

Now, with the combination of what you know about computers,

what you know about space,

what you know about intelligence,

I know, I know what you want to know.

Sean wants to know,

he wants to know if there's aliens,

but we're not going to ask him that.

What I want to know from you is,

based on your knowledge of all those areas,

does it seem possible to you

that there is the requisite amount of intelligence and technology

at a place other than Earth?

Ooh, see, he asks,

is a different way than I would.

Well, of course it's possible,

although my guess,

based on spending a lot of years dealing with telescopes

and thinking about these things,

is that when we, for the first time,

get a way more advanced technological intelligence

showing up on this planet,

it's probably going to be in our lifetime,

and it's probably not going to come from outer space.

It's going to be something we built.

What do you mean? What do you mean?

So you're saying that we're building something to bring them here?

No, I mean, we're basically...

The goal of artificial intelligence has always been

to build stuff that's way smarter than us.

They just don't have cars they need to get here.

And they're all going to be dead when they get here.

No, wait, keep going.

If you basically build a new species, a new life form,

that's way, way smarter than us, right?

That's alien.

That's alien. It's incredibly alien.

It's much more different from a chipmunk or a tiger,

in that it really has nothing in common with our evolutionary history,

and doesn't necessarily care even about food

or reproducing itself.

So if we do that,

it's going to be just as big an event on Earth as if aliens show up,

and that's why I'm kind of weirded out

that people talk so little bit about it.

That's what I'm saying.

That's what I'm saying.

As despicable as human...

Human beings were all, including me, everybody,

were just so despicable that if the announcement came

that, like, oh, my God, there are aliens,

they're visiting our planet, people would be like,

oh, okay, I got to check my Instagram.

Like, I don't think people would be, like, giving shit.

Based on that, it seems to me that what you would want to do

is make sure that somehow built in all this stuff

is some kind of a kill switch,

and that the wise men who are...

And women.

You know what I mean, but like a group, right,

probably made up of you and your other colleagues,

male or female from around the world that are the leading scientists

in this area would get together

on some encrypted platform and say,

let's make sure we, only us five,

know about this one thing that we could press

to shut all these AI robots down

that we've created on our planet.

I won't tell anybody.

I won't tell anybody.

All four kill switches.

That's what I do.

I know you would.

This sounds a little too elitist for me

because the idea that somehow, you know,

you guys have the dudes who are like, know a lot about AI,

should decide humanity's future.

I want it in your hands.

But that's how it is now, you know.

If the rest of us, everybody doesn't get engaged in these things,

who's going to make all these decisions?

It's going to be probably a bunch of dudes

in some back room or some who have not been elected.

Are people who are super AI nerds,

like specialists in human happiness?

Only they would know the ramifications of something

getting in the wrong hands.

But are they the ones who should be deciding

what makes you do that?

Of course, not some elected weirdo.

Yeah.

Look what happens.

I don't trust particularly elected people,

but I also don't trust tech nerds

with being experts in psychology and what...

Then who can we trust?

Then we got to shut it down.

Us, everybody.

Can't trust it to the nerds?

What are you talking about?

You should all talk about it.

Let me ask you guys.

Suppose you have a magic wand that you can wave, okay,

and create this future 35 years from now,

when there is this very advanced AI,

and you get to decide how the planet is organized,

what it's used for, and what it's not used for.

So it's not going to be your standard dystopian Hollywood flick.

What is this future like?

What do you want it to be like?

Well, that makes me want to take a nap.

Well, you would...

Yes, and what do you want it to be like?

I would want all the technological advances

that we have to go to the bettering of the living experience,

which means health and kindness and all that stuff.

You know, you point it all in that direction,

and then good decisions come from that?

I don't know.

Yes.

Brave New World.

Well, that sounds great.

A frighteningly tepid response.

Let's compare that with what we're mostly spending

the AI money on now, right?

This amount of money is spent on advertising,

which ends up making teenage girls anorexic.

And then we have a massive amount of enormous amount of money

now building robots to kill people for the first time

when they were used in Libya last year.

They hunted down these fleeing people and just killed them

because the robots decided that they were probably bad guys.

And I think...

I did not know about that.

It's a...

I don't know.

Did you guys all know about that?

About the robots that hunted the people down?

I didn't gloss over that.

What happened?

This is the shit that I'm talking about, man.

It actually has some dark comedic value, I think.

Yeah, it sounds hilarious.

The current policy, actually, of the U.S. government

on killer robots and slaughterbots is...

Slaughterbots.

Three things.

First of all, the U.S. says...

That's like murder hornets.

First of all, we're saying this is nasty stuff.

We don't ever want to delegate kill decisions to the machine,

so we're not going to do it.

Second, it's going to have a decisive impact on the battlefield.

And third, we're going to reserve the rights for all other countries

to build them and export them to whoever they want.

So this was this Turkish company decided to sell them to Libya

against the arms embargo,

and that's why they hunted these people down.

We went in a really short span.

We went from replicating a sheep to slaughterbots.

It seems like that happened really quickly.

We were talking to a guest earlier today about time travel.

So it's on our minds.

And we do have to ask you, like we did before,

did you time travel here?

I did.

Is there any chance, and I won't bore you with the same question

that I asked that astronomer that we had about the mirrors?

Neil deGrasse Tyson.

It was a real highlight.

I'm going to try here.

Wait, Will said Neil deGrasse Tyson was on,

and Jason asked a really long question about time travel,

and Will said, hey, do you think we could put enough mirrors

to travel back in time to the beginning of Jason's question?

And it's a ballad.

It's hard for me.

It's a ballad.

So the light we get from the sun has been traveling seven minutes.

Eight minutes.

Eight minutes.

So we're basically feeling something that's eight minutes old.

We're back on it.

That's right.

So isn't there a way to have a mirror that creates anyway?

Yes, actually there is.

He says yes.

He likes my thinking.

Make sure you built one for us, actually.

In the middle of our galaxy, there's this monster black hole

that weighs about four million times as much as the sun,

and it's black.

Oh, that's mine.

No, it's a black hole.

And if you look at it really carefully,

light that went from you actually was bent by its gravity

so much that it comes back on the other side of the black hole,

like a mirror.

So if you look with a really good telescope,

in principle, you could see your own reflection

except so long ago that you weren't born yet.

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Wait, so talk, go.

So that's basically time trial.

In other words, these telescopes, like the one we just launched off,

they're looking so far back,

they might actually see the Big Bang at some point

or something.

We're seeing the galaxy at an earlier stage than us.

So eventually, if you get a telescope strong enough,

you could see the start of Earth, potentially.

It all came out of the Big Bang.

We all took mushrooms before.

Yeah, and we were so interested.

Somewhere in there is there an answer about the possibility of time travel.

Yeah, so this is a kind of see-but-not-touch time travel.

The sky is a time machine, just like that.

You know, you see me three nanoseconds ago.

You see the sun eight minutes ago.

You see stars at night, if it's clear.

So long ago, the people over there looking at us

would see maybe the Boston Tea Party.

And we can see things that happened over 13 billion years ago.

But you can also travel forward in time for real.

No bullshit, real time travel.

You go to this black hole here.

I was told, actually, when I moved to the U.S.

that in America, possession is 95% of the law.

Is that true?

You know what, now it's yours.

So anyway, if you just orbit around this black hole really close,

which you can actually do, I give this as a homework problem to my MIT students,

then your time will actually slow down so much that if you're on Skype with you,

you'll be hearing him go like,

Hello, I'm here.

And then you're going to hear him say,

Oh my God, I'm so worried about what's going on there.

Well, that's accurate.

Because your times are actually running at different rates.

And then when you come back, you look so good, so youthful.

Because you're actually younger than you would have been otherwise.

So are we going to be alive when we start to see any of this stuff

that's going to really blow our minds?

Yeah, and Mars, are we living on Mars? Go.

So this is the upside of artificial intelligence.

Throw that into this.

That's not a follow-up, it's a different subject.

By the way you mentioned before, Boston Tea Party, too soon, good.

This is the upside of artificial intelligence.

It's just for us, too soon, huh?

This is the upside of artificial intelligence.

Either we can use it to go extinct in our lifetime,

or we can use it to bring all these awesome things about in our lifetime.

We used to think, oh, this is going to take 10,000 years to get like the sci-fi novels,

because we humans have to figure out all the tech ourselves.

No, if we can build this incredibly advanced AI,

which can then build more advanced AI, et cetera, et cetera,

we might be able to build this tech, you know, 30, 40 years from now.

And suddenly we're not limited by our own pace of developing tech.

We just go, boom, and we're limited by the laws of physics.

Well, and by the laws of ethics, like if, just because we can, should we?

Like, how do we know when we, as a society, are mature enough

to handle some of the technology that we can access?

I think going and having some fun, joy-riding around black holes is ethically okay.

It's my inner nerd speaking here.

As long as you don't force other people to go with you.

But on the other hand...

Don't be a nerd, we're just going to the black hole.

Like, we're not forcing, but it is peer pressure.

That's one of the questions that they asked in Jurassic Park was just...

Oh, good Jurassic Park, good.

Yes, I'm in.

Keep on the science.

Just because you can create this island with these dinosaurs, should you?

Now, based on the science of that, the amber that was frozen in there

with the DNA of the dinosaurs, is that real?

Is that real?

Well, now, you know, we have my friend George Church down in Harvard here.

He's talking about already bringing back the mammoth

by just taking the DNA together, assembling an error-correcting executor,

then basically DNA printing out the mammoth DNA, and boom, mammoth.

We can do a lot of these things.

Leaving...

We can come back to the ethical questions.

Who's stopping him, exactly?

Who's...

What's the...

Me, what's his name again?

George Church?

Can you put him on the show?

What's the council that's going to say yes or no?

Let me just say a bigger thing first, though.

Just to get the controversies out of the way, you know.

I think we humans, to really get the ethical decisions right

and let people forfeit some dumb stuff,

we have to remember how much upside there is also.

We're living on this little spinning ball in space

with almost eight billion people on it,

and we've been spending so many years killing each other

over a little bit more sand here and a little bit more forest there.

We're in this huge universe, right?

We thought was off limits.

Well, with AI, it could be on limits again.

We could go to the Alpha Centauri system in a lifetime.

We could have a future where life is flourishing in our galaxy

and in our other galaxies,

where there's just such an amazing abundance

that people are going to be wondering,

like, why did these guys futz around for so many years

on this little planet and fight squabble about breadcrumbs

instead of going out here?

Most of this universe, despite all the Star Trek episodes out there,

no offense, so far really don't seem to have woken up

and come alive in any major way.

I feel that we humans have a moral responsibility

to see if we can help life.

Our universe wake up some more and help life spread.

But what if we run out of time with our use on this planet

because of environment where we don't...

I'm reading your mind.

Yeah, we're getting to Mars.

So can we point the AI to our challenges here

regarding the environment, fix that real quick,

and then we can explore everywhere else?

I think we need to fix things here in parallel.

The reason that rainforest is partly gone,

the reason we're messing up our climate and so many other things

isn't because we didn't know 10 years ago what to do about it.

It's because we kind of already built another kind of AI.

These very powerful systems, corporations, governments, et cetera,

that have goals that aren't so aligned with the rainforest

and maybe the overall goals of...

If we can use the AI to tell them how they can make more profit

doing things that don't kill the Earth,

then they'll stop chopping down the forest.

Well, maybe we should take a bigger step back, you know.

The whole point of having a...

You've got stock in Exxon, don't you?

He's not comfortable answering this.

My undergrad was in economics, so I'm very sympathetic to this free market.

You're doing things more efficient.

The whole point of the free market is that you should get done efficiently

things that you want to get done,

and then you should have, of course, some guidelines.

That's why we decided to ban child labor in the U.S.

That's why we decided to invent the weekend.

Wait, you don't like the weekend?

I think you should have changed.

But right now, if you create something,

whether it be a super powerful dictatorship

or it beats a tobacco company that tries to convince you

that cancer smoking isn't dangerous or whatever,

it has its own goals and it's going to act.

It's good to think of these things a little bit like in AI,

even though it's not made out of robots, it's made of people,

because there's no person in a tobacco company

who can single-handedly change its goals.

If the CEO decides to stop selling cigarettes,

he's just going to get fired.

We should start thinking about how do we just align the incentives

of all the companies?

I want to keep private companies, incentives of people,

incentives of companies, incentives of politicians,

with the incentives of humanity itself,

to get what you were asking for,

as a society in the future.

The change is more cultural rather than scientific, if you will.

Yeah, although you do need to geek out a lot about the whole business with incentives.

Like, why did we invent the legal system in the US?

Well, because we realize it's not so smart

that people always kill each other every time they get into a squabble

about a hot dog, right?

Right, create consequences.

So you change consequences and now they'll think twice

and they'll just punch each other instead or settle it in some other way.

Alignment is kind of the big slogan a lot of us nerds have for this.

You want to align the incentives, not just the machines,

but also the organizations with what's actually good for humanity.

And we're in this unfortunate situation now

where whenever an entity gets too powerful,

it doesn't have to be a machine or a dictator,

it could even be a company,

that they start to now like take over whoever was supposed to regulate them

and turn them into like your rubber staff.

Now they're suddenly not going to be so aligned with what's good for America anymore,

or good for humanity.

And this problem, we cannot wait for AI to solve it.

We have to start solving that in the meantime.

Amen.

But you know, that's been the modus operandi up till now

and we're running out of time and people are taking their profits

because they figured they're going to be dead before the ramifications of it really...

So I think the computers have to help us out.

Yes, absolutely.

So this is why I'm so into this AI empowerment thing,

why I want to think about how can we use AI

and put it into the hands of people

so that they can very easily like catch other powerful entities

that are trying to screw them over.

And it's a way of using technology to strengthen democracy.

Are we going to live on the moon at all?

You want to?

Yeah.

Is that possible?

Are we planning on that?

Would you want to?

Can you believe that?

Do you want to?

Yeah, I would.

I would totally live there.

All of these things are certainly possible.

I was very much of the opinion that it's easier to make

and really comfortable and pleasant life on this planet.

So I would also like to make sure we don't ruin it.

Is there one project that you're working on right now,

just one that you feel extremely passionate about right now

that you could share with us?

It's actually improvethenews.org, this thing I mentioned earlier.

It's called improvenews.org.

Improvethenews.org.

It's just this free little news aggregator,

but it's all powered by machine learning

so that's why it can actually read 5,000 news articles every day,

which I can.

I'm so turned that out.

And then what we're doing is, instead of just saying,

okay, today we have a lot of news sites,

you can go there and read about all the good things

that Democrats have done

and all the bad things Republicans have done.

And then there are other ones where you can read about

all the great things that Republicans have done

and how the bad things Democrats have done.

With this one, the AI figures out which articles

are about the same story.

Maybe it finds now 62 things about the new

U.S. National Death Passing 30 trillion or whatever.

And then it's like, okay, then you can come in and say,

okay, here are the facts that all the articles agree on.

Boom, boom, boom.

If you're a fact kind of guy, you can now click away

and go to the next story.

But if you want to know also all the narratives,

it separates out.

Here is what this narrative, that narrative.

Does it have photos?

Would it have a photo of Will last January 6th?

You mean in the Capitol on that?

No way.

With the goggles and the thing?

There's no way you're getting that photo.

How much will you pay me again?

What's best word'll score?

Go.

And be careful.

He got an unbeatable score today.

Got it in two, this guy.

Not bad.

Not bad.

That sounds amazing.

But it's so exciting.

Also just all the emails you get from people.

Because I think, again, bits are free.

You can give them away to the world.

And AI sounds fancy, but it's just code.

Well, listen, I want you with a fresh mind tomorrow

when you get back at it.

So I don't want you to stay up later anymore today.

Thank you for joining us.

Do you guys feel a little smarter?

Yes.

A little bit smarter.

I feel smarter.

I definitely do.

Please say thank you to Max.

Thank you, Max.

Thank you.

Thank you very, very much, buddy.

Here, pal.

Thank you very much.

Wow.

Max.

Thank you, Max.

Now, here's the thing.

Here's the thing.

I, go ahead.

How much dumber do you think you are than him?

Like on like an IQ score,

what do you think his score is versus yours?

He reminded me how much smarter I am than you,

which was great.

That's fair.

Like, actually, I feel very buoyed by that whole experience.

Do you think it's double his intelligence?

Double your, oh, his, over mine?

Over mine.

Oh, easily.

No, no, no, no.

I mean, he's just, he has a very big brain.

I could talk to him for hours.

I don't know that he would listen to me

for more than five minutes,

but I could talk to him for hours.

Yeah.

I love all his fantastic guests.

Yeah.

Like, right up my alley.

Right up my alley.

Very cool.

And, and, I think that if, I think that if we all spent

more time thinking about that kind of stuff,

just a little bit,

then maybe we could get around to solving some big issues

tonight.

Let's solve it tonight, guys.

Everybody, huddle up.

Yeah.

That was so cool.

Thank you.

I know you, we all kind of share,

we love all of our guests.

Those are nice pops because there's stuff

that we don't usually cover on the podcast,

and I've just repeated myself,

but I just love that stuff.

I could ask him a million more questions.

Well, it's the original conceit of this thing,

Ergo the title.

We thought we'd, you know, bring people on that can

educate us a little bit more on things that we don't know

about.

We happen to get lazy and ask some of our famous

fancy friends to come on.

This is a real treat to be able to access these,

you know, big, big thinkers in this incredible town.

Yeah.

So, thanks for having us.

And now, like, it's sort of, it's incumbent upon us to

really kind of do something about it.

We can't sit around all day in our pajamas,

you know, and in our slippers, you know what I mean?

Or then just go to the golf course and then get in

our Teslas.

We have to.

Right?

Don't you think, don't you think that's important for,

and I'm not, I don't want to single anybody else.

I will never be one of those people.

The ruining things.

But, but no, it is true that thank you for,

you've educated us a little bit more.

It's pretty, pretty bad.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, I could talk to him,

I want to talk about the web telescope because,

you know, those kinds of things.

Oh God, here comes a bye everybody.

Get you feel it when he starts to ramp up the engine.

No.

Sean, if you don't lay in it, you can't do it.

No.

You just got to get into it more subtly.

Well, I'm just saying, I'm just saying,

like, telescope like that is much better than any,

you know, thing like this.

What are these called?

Oh, those are.

Are you kidding?

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Thank you, Boston.

Thank you so much.

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