What Is Intelligence? With David Krakauer

0:00My O deas as linda O regado por mi abir Translation My God, you're beautiful Thank you for listening Yes, I'm talking to you But I'm talking to you in Portuguese That is correct You never know when you're going to find yourself in Portugal Or when you're going to talk to somebody from Brazil Who also speaks Portuguese You know, if you're going to travel anywhere You'd be surprised how much it helps to know the language Even if you don't know it fluently But let's say you do want to know it fluently Well, I have an answer for both Rosetta Stone That's right, Rosetta Stone has just launched Rosetta Stone Sapphire Featuring Sapphire Studio Which lets you personalize your learning around what you actually care about right now Now we all know that I use Rosetta Stone So that I can understand what my mother-in-law is saying about me behind my back But maybe you're traveling And you just want to know, hey, what do I say when I check in?

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2:01Plus, it can stay with bigger projects for hours while you still remain in control Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode Available, on-plus and pro plans That was quite the overview on what it is to be intelligent It went places I didn't even know intelligence went Deep Yeah, and for some reason I still feel stupid Coming up, start talk, special edition Everything you need to know about intelligence Welcome to Start Talk Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide Start talk, begin right now This is Start Talk, special edition, Neil deGrasse Tyson You are a personal astrophysicist And if it's special edition it means Gary O'Reilly in the house

3:01Hi Neil Hey, former soccer pro, soccer announcer Of course we got Chuck Nice, baby That's right, Tempest and a T-Cup The Lord of Nice Lord of Nice Exactly Did you and your producers stitch together for today? Well, with all this talk of artificial intelligence has everyone stopped to think What is intelligence in general? That's what we're doing today Everybody thinks they know what it is and no one can really define it That's because they're all dumbasses To Chuck's point How did intelligence evolve? And why? What chances are there are beings far smarter than us? That's a low bar Oh yeah It's we are the universe's way of knowing itself Is the universe screwed? Neil I mean if we're the best it's got to figure itself out You know, maybe I want to know that answer, maybe I don't But we're going to ask it anyway And that quote, I think is traceable to Carl Sagan, might have been in one of the episodes of Cosmos

4:05The original Cosmos Well, let's find out what our guest has to say You talk about intelligence evolve and in what way? Yeah We have an evolutionary biologist You need them every now and then Straighten things out And he's also president and the William H. Miller professor of complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute Of course that would be in New Mexico Yes I'm sorry, you mean New America? Well, it's a party job And he specializes in complexity and intelligence Join me in welcoming David Crack our day Welcome Beautiful to be back in person In person, we can verify that Pokemon makes sure he's real Not a hologram Not a hologram So I'd like the fact that you study complex systems But you have roots in evolutionary biology Because that's where we are life forms and that's where it all begins

5:07So could you just shed some luminosity on the evolution of intelligence as we think about it? Yeah, well, okay So the first question is What is the relationship between life and intelligence? Right, can one conceive of a life that wasn't intelligent? Can one consider or conceive of an intelligence that's not alive? I think the latter, yes, and we might talk about that But the former probably know And so as soon as you have life You have some form of intelligence Okay, so what is that? And I guess the canonical simple argument would be These are some form of organized matter That consents the environment And act in a way that increases its representation in the world Either through replication or what have you In the interest of its own survival In the interest of its own survival

6:08And so any life form that consents and behave in a way that's adaptive We would have to grant has some form of intelligence Okay So the interesting theoretical problem here is that Life feels a bit binary You don't say that a flea is less alive than an elephant Right, so that's kind of an interesting fact Whereas intelligence is not So how does a kind of binary system give rise to a continuous one And that's kind of the theory challenge for the origin of intelligence Tell me again what you mean by the binary of the example So simple, I mean You're either alive or you're not But that doesn't mean that the level of intelligence you have Is dependent on you being alive or not It's a great nation Because intelligence has a continuum Right You either alive or dead does not Right, got it, okay Just to clarify that So that's okay, so that's the first question, right? So over the course of time What are the forces that have created higher levels of intelligence If they have That's an interesting question itself Maybe it's entirely context dependent

7:09Maybe there's a sense in which a bacterium in the world Is more intelligent than a human destroying a world You know, one could go there if one wanted In other words, you would say humans with high intelligence Who destroy their world are not acting in the interest of their survival I would say this to you And that would definitely say There would be a dimaret against their intelligence scale Absolutely And what about this? Because when you said bacterium Is there any kind of collective intelligence Where the hole is greater than the sum? For sure I mean, in a sense that's our own brains, right? So we have billions of nerve cells each of which is quite simple Correct That's correct That's correct And they create thought mathematics, music, all the things that we have That was a stupid question Well, no, I didn't mean it I didn't mean it as a part of one entity like our brain I meant like our gut Where those bacteria are all different types But they work together to cause us to have emotions And cause us to think certain ways

8:10They're operating in tandem with our brain But they're all separate bacteria Absolutely I mean, there's this slight paradox that happens So this is the world of collective intelligence Like swarms and so on Yeah Yeah, right, because normally when you think of a collective intelligence Is the ensemble Right Organisms Operating in a way that one individual would not otherwise understand But the ensemble does Right I mean, this is emerging things like flocking Flocking the birds, I guess Or yeah Or when you see fish change all direction, all at once Even though I don't even know if that's like electrochemical or not But who knows You know No, but there's an interesting thing that happens here that's surprising Which is that brains made of very simple cells produce extraordinary thoughts Whereas human societies kind of made of extraordinary individual thoughts Produces a total shit show in the aggregate So there's an interesting relationship between parts and holes

9:11Right You have very smart parts, you don't necessarily have a smart hole That's true Because there's nothing less intelligent than a mob of people with pitchforks and teaky torches True It seems to be inverse correlated with a number of people who are part of the mob Right Yeah They act less in less intelligent But more and more as a unit Yes Isn't that funny Okay And the more intelligent that mob is the more monolithic, the more monolithic it is in intent That's correct Right and that, that is in some sense gets back to this question of evolution Because evolution you call these major evolutionary transitions So you go from a single cell, like a prokaryotic cell, like a bacteria, a bacterial match A collective, a single eukaryotic cell, a multi-cell, a tissue, an organism So that is the story and in every case it's not clear

10:11Whether the aggregate is somehow more restrictive, less intelligent than the parts So you're talking about around evolution here Yeah Would it come to our human intelligence, was the turning point when we get complicated language Or was it something else Hmm Well I mean not in that Well, let me prepend that Because you're saying we have language and other animals don't, or do they not have language So let's broaden that question to when organisms communicate complex information Do we call it language when a bee communicates to another bee in a hive where we're to go Where to move the camp So, and on the limit that we would think of as a limit as our complex language Do you distinguish as an evil bio person, not evil bio, but evil bio person

11:11Do you distinguish dolphins squeaking at each other from humans squeaking at each other Or not? Yeah, it's a difficult one So I think the jury is out But one, one, quite useful distinction I quite like So in the biology community people talk about signalling and communicating as being somewhat distinct from language Sure And so I guess with human language, Alexander von Humboldt had a nice phrase I like here And he said loud Tell us briefly about him So he was a great 18th century naturalist, kind of invented ecology as we know it Was a great explorer, took extensive measurements And he was German French? German German, German And actually my friend Andrea Wolf wrote his biography in invention and nature, beautiful book I plug for the book And if I remember, I think I own some of his books, didn't he write about? Cosmos, what's that? He wrote a whole series of books called Cosmos Yes, and I think one of his books tries to connect our understanding of science to make a better society

12:14I mean, I think he was a civic scientist Part of his intellectual efforts He'd be so happy if he saw it today No Well, but that's an interesting point, I mean that romantic movement where they were all in some sense entangled with each other You didn't get to just be a scientist or a good citizen, you should be both Entangled in a good way In a good way So tell us more, I'm sorry, interrupted you So yeah, so he has this phrase where he says human language is making infinite use of finite means And what he meant by that is if you have a grammar, it's like a rule system You can construct almost any thought out of it Absolutely And that flexibility that you get with language is not as evident in simple signaling system like chemical ones or even gestural ones actually And how about now we know whales have a certain type of language They don't we don't know how extensive it is But humpbacks call for help when killer whales or orcas are around

13:18And the other whales respond so clearly they call for backup They call for backup, you know And they'll even attack the orcas when they're going after seals They're not just going after the other whales So that's language, how are monkeys worn each other about jaguars who are in the forest Just to be clear, jaguars, if memory serves can climb trees in ways that lines cannot So monkey is not entirely satan tree And that's exactly why they want to be concerned Right, so what I'm saying is that can be considered signaling but it can also be considered language Well, okay, so all right, so yeah, so people, so there's an American philosopher Charles Perse And he made a distinction, so I'm going to get into this signal thing Okay And he made a distinction between what he called an index, an icon, an symbol So the point is this, I've heard that monkeys, chanians say far famously worked on these different signals

14:18Birds, so if you say falcon or they emit a sound, they crouch down So there's a correlated behavior, right, and if there's a kind of terrestrial predator, the climb tree and so on So they have those and in the kind of signaling literature, that would be described as an index But there's a kind of mapping one to one, that sound always means which out there's an aerial predator Now with humans And power, it completely per absolute, so you can say that's how it's acquired maybe or a name and so on Or it doesn't even have to, it can be just a sound like the bell, anything that has a sound Right, okay Now in the human case, you can substitute any sound for any appropriate response of almost arbitrary complication Correct And that's something you learn in your lifetime Wow And I think that, so it's not that they don't have something that's embryonic of our ability But what we do is quite extraordinary I didn't think of it that way, but you're absolutely right

15:18Because now I'm thinking about in all the movies they're like, and here's the signal And that means take out your math textbook So yeah Okay, alright, well that's very good You may have heard the best voice in show business, Morgan Freeman, talking about a serious and undidignosed heart condition But often missed a TTR cardiac amyloidosis or a TTRCM It's a condition that can greatly disrupt your life with symptoms like severe fatigue, shortness of breath and carpal tunnel If left untreated, a TTRCM may become serious leading to a shorter lifespan A trubi helps adults with a TTRCM live longer and have fewer hospitalizations due to heart issues So you can focus more on living for what you love Tell your doctor if you're pregnant, plan to become pregnant or are breastfeeding and about the medications you take

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18:29Hmm, what else? What am I doing right now? I am kind of counting some of the pieces in my closet that make up the staples in my wardrobe I'm talking about easy pieces that make fashion effortless and make me look like a fashion guru Not that I'm not, let's be honest. Quince is what I'm really talking about because quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless thoughtful, crafted, and made to be worn again and again And that's exactly what I do And when the temperature starts to drop, quince makes it easy to build on those everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long If you're new to the podcast, you probably don't know that I've been a long time customer of quince long before they started supporting start talk And that's why I'm super happy to tell you about them

19:29All the pieces that I named up front I have AND more Not to mention the number of family members that have received their excellent Kazmir pieces from me as a gift Keep that in mind because you know the holidays are coming Find your next fall favorites at quince download the quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too And when quince asks where you heard about them let them know that it was start talk radio and the fashion guru chuck nice that tells you all about it It's the best way to support the show quince.com go there right now Hmm, quasars The word is a pseudo acronym for quasis stellar radio source What's a quasar? These are objects that are among the most distant things known in the universe

20:31How do we know about them at all? Because they're really really luminous Some of them is luminous as 500 trillion Suns That's why we can see them to the edge of the universe If you like that fact you can find 4,999 more in lost in space 5,000 facts to help navigate the universe Lost in space is now available wherever you get your books Does the expression of complex language predate the development of what we think of as our intelligence or did it follow it? Good question

21:31Why would you have answers to the question? I don't know I don't want you to hear that I want you to say I have an answer to that These don't you know the reality is you know this they don't have final conclusive answers They're not even close But I would say that in turn, okay, so I'm going to define it I think I did last time I was talking to you guys So intelligence for me is making hard problems easy Okay, that's basically it Across the animal species, every species, even plants So you know finding an efficient way of solving a problem Not an inefficient way of sort of get to AI in a minute which is all about inefficient solutions to problems But that's something else So I think that's everywhere All life forms find elegant ways of solving problems in their world Now the question is what does language add above and beyond an innate repertoire or even a simple Pavlovian association And I think the possibility for almost arbitrarily complex behaviors which don't necessarily produce intelligent behavior

22:31They produce warfare and so forth when strife But that's the thing that we do And I think it's somewhat decouples from the question of intelligence It creates great intelligence but it also creates great stupidity How are we distinguishing between intelligence and consciousness? Wow Yeah, so we're just barely getting intelligence here Good thought consciousness and right on top of it I actually think consciousness is easier than intelligence because easier And I read some of your work and you cite the fact that mathematicians will tell you They're unconscious mind, subconscious unconscious will solve the math problem but not your conscious mind So intelligence and consciousness how we distinguish it So okay, I wouldn't say too much You're talking about the old edge sleep on it Exactly, the cacouli problem, exactly that So let me do a bit of both here I'm not sure the best way to do it So on the consciousness side I quite like this way of defining it at a Neil Seth

23:31What's unconsciousness does Let's say intelligence about problem solving and consciousness is about being and feeling So I consider consciousness very primordial In other words, any organism that lives in an environment that it has to sense And maintain its integrity in some way That could be a single-celled organism that could be a cat That could be a whale They were manifesting consciousness is about feeling And the sense of self that's required to survive We didn't have a sense of self They're, oh my god, my foot's gone, it doesn't matter It sort of matters And intelligence is about problem solving Now, so that's the first point Now unconsciousness that we were talking about is very interesting Which is for most of our evolutionary history we didn't have language And so somehow we were having to solve problems in the world as every other animal does Without that kind of declarative self-awareness And so in that sense there's more if you like neural resources available To solve problems unconsciously Then in that tiny, thin layer of cells that we call the frontal cortex

24:34That we associate with consciousness Right, just because early on we didn't have a language Doesn't mean the thoughts were subconscious Well, that's also an interesting question Right, so for most people... Just not telling me I have interesting questions Well, you do now And so this is the thing where a lot of people would associate self-consciousness With deliberation which seems to depend on the possession of language Yes Yes, but that's only because we have the language that we have Okay, because we don't know if a lion is deliberating Or if other apes that were part of that family If they actually look up and go And you know, if I didn't want to throw my poop right now That'd be a very beautiful thing to look at We don't know that But the fact that we have this inner dialogue is the reason why we believe that we are I think therefore I am

25:34Right, because we've all seen animal kingdom videos Where two animals typically the same species There's a stand-off and they sort of paste back and forth You know something's going on in the head Something has to be going on Something like, should I do this? Right Would I make it out of this alive? No one know that it is You don't make me come out of this You don't want none of this? You're not built like that, son Don't make me put my foot up your ass You can't tell me nothing's going on in the brain No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no I would say that for a second I think that so the question of intelligence, as I said at the beginning, is ubiquitous And degrees of it, and high degrees of it, in the non-human world Absolutely But there's an interesting fact, right, which is that there is a tighter coupling between Siggling and behavior in non-humans and humans You could watch humans all day long in a library And have no idea what they're doing or deliberating about And the examples you gave in animal behavior, there are clues in terms of how they're manifesting their intelligence in their behavior

26:37Language is this weird thing, it's kind of almost decoupling us from our immediate space-time context That bit is the bit that feels and it might not be somewhat unique to our species No, and it might not be, but you're absolutely right Earlier offline, David and I were talking about comedians and how improvisation is this very unique thing that they do And I mentioned to him that when I'm on stage and I'm improvising The thing that's weird is I can almost feel my brain being semi-conscious There's like a part of my brain that takes over that moment And I'm not actually thinking Have you seen a doctor? I know, most people right now are listening like, Tell us, are you ever actually thinking? Is that intuition? Does that only become an intuition? Well, no, it's funny because the way I look at it is people say that you have a subconscious mind or an unconscious mind

27:42And what I feel when I'm in that moment is that that part of my being, my subconscious, is accessible to me so that it's kind of a slight overlap in the Venn diagram of my consciousness and unconsciousness Where my executive function is able to dip into the subconscious and pull something out That's where I just know And I think that's the interesting point that's not talked about enough, this distinction If you break intelligence down a little bit into skill and expertise So expertise, the essence of it is practice that gives rise to automaticity That you don't have to think about it If you're a great athlete, we were talking about that, you're taking a shot The last thing you wanted to do is think about it You're not going to make it And exactly the same thing, you're not going to take the shot It's exactly the same with math, you're learning mathematics Get out of your head Exactly So there is this very thing that happens It looks as if you need language that early deliberative process

28:44And then you practice out of the language And then you're returning to a state that's not even linguistic So it's almost pure program, pure reflex But you have to do it via language So we learn mathematics, like we learn sports You practice it enough, you're not thinking about, oh my God, how do I integrate that function? You just do it And I think expertise is in fact paradoxically not thinking Yes, because you built the muscle memory Or the conception memories So you're not consciously thinking When you're in that zone, your subconscious is feeding you It's feeding you in the moment Without poor thought, it's happening in the moment So our conscious mind has access to our senses All the whole sensory or palate And it's a survival But our subconscious, our unconscious mind does that have access to the senses And then it doesn't want anything to do with our survival It's got another executive sort of mission statement Because when you're dreaming, you're not really responsive to touch

29:45I mean, nobody, you know, it's, you disconnect it You can play music, the dream is on its own space It's almost like it's making its own sensory world So actually my colleague, the novelist, called Matt McCarthy He wrote this beautiful essay called The Cocoolay Problem And right, the discovery of the structure of the benzene ring And there was kind of a dreamt solution The snake eats its tail The snake eats tail And Carmack's point was very interesting He said, the unconscious mind evolved long before language emerged Because other animals presumably have an unconscious too Right? And it doesn't want to communicate to us in language So it communicates with us visually So for example, the auroboros is snake that eats its own tail And so Cocoolay wakes up and he says, wait a minute, what's going on? What are you trying to tell me? Why can't you just tell me? And the unconscious mind, I don't do language you moron Right? I do symbols, I do visual intuition Yes And then he imposes on it the language of modern chemistry through language

30:46Well Why are we programmed to absorb information that way in a better way? Because that's the problem solving aspect Obviously we're asleep, there's no noise The brain is quiet But you value judging it, saying it's better, I would say it's different And as an educator, some people have visual learners Some are wrote learners, some are So what you just said, it cracks this nut of human cognition for me Because for example, when I'm speaking typically I use my hands And not just in an Italian way where you put emphasis like this I will gesture an image of what I'm also saying I'll say earth is going around the sun So that there's another way it's entering their mind And I find it to be much more potent that way Accessing both parts of that brain Yeah, we're totally multimodal I mean exactly as you say, I mean it's visual or factory

31:46And linguistic, they all buttress one another, right? And consolidate But this question of, I mean the argument would be that What we're calling for are at the present moment, the unconscious Whatever that means And these words all a little bit fluid Is older, so to the evolutionary question Been around for much longer So animals, animals, animals, animals, animals are calculated trajectories Using rules of thumb, heuristics all the time We then give it this additional glass But a lot of the calculation, and this has been written about Endless sleep by mathematicians reflecting on how they solve problems They're not necessarily solving the problems deductively symbolically They get to go to sleep, dream clues to the solution to the problem And then wake up and impose on top of it the secondary armature of language Which is useful because you can communicate it How can I communicate it? Well I dreamt of this snail that's sort of eating a leopard And you'd say to me, I don't know what you're talking about So the symbolic thing doesn't naturally lend itself to communication

32:49And the way language does Yeah, okay However, you know, for the longest time we did communicate in symbols written form So before we had alphabets, which everybody does now Which some of the alphabets of the world right now are pictograms They're not actual Chinese, the Chinese, the Chinese, the economy Right? So you know, for the longest time we drew pictures to communicate our thoughts And once we figured out words, that's where we are now But getting back to your point of the source of where an insight might come There's the famous discussion of the mathematician, Roman Nugin Is that, if I remember his name correctly, who he was Hindu And he would say the solution just came to him And it was, you know, Vishnu or Krishna Putting the solution on his tongue to be shared with others So he was wrong, it was Jesus Jesus, Jesus, Jesus You're only encouraging me

33:52So in what way does one's cultural bias influence what they think is the operating force on their thoughts? That's a very, you know, that's a very difficult question to answer right Because presumably I would guess that the underlying unconscious process is quite universal And then the secondary form it takes when we communicate it And this show, I think when he says universal he means earth-wide I mean, yeah, I do, I mean global I mean global Yeah, terrestrial, for all life For human life The earth life And this secondary cultural layer that we impose, whether we call it, you know, Jesus or Vishnu or what have you or the Buddha That's where the variability probably exists, but I would guess that the underlying dream state or unconscious solution is pretty quite universal So let me get back to that dream state Do we know the title of the short story that became Blade Runner?

34:53Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep So that brings us... Androids Dream of Electric Sheep There you go Now somebody was high He was, Philip K. Gick was always high So Philip K. Gick was the best So that gets us to the question Will AI never be us because AI doesn't dream And will solutions available from our dream states never be available to AI? So there's a few things to say about this, right? I hope more than a few There are many things to say We started with the evolution story And I made the claim that sentience or consciousness or sensation was primordial That all beings have it That is definitely not true Of Nilla Lem So point one The large language, my brain It has a completely different path towards its intelligency Secondly, it immediately starts with the language

35:56It just doesn't have an unconscious There is no unconscious So it's just got a linguistic foundation right at the beginning Thirdly, it's a collective linguistic It's not an individual language learner It's every book ever written That's right So there are some really fun to make for this Including 14 of my books that are now in a class action suit That's why I want to give that So these are important differences So start with the last thing that we got Which is language And ignore what every other organism has Which is this, if you like, homeostatic, sentient form of existence, pre-language Right Wait, wait, wait, where are you taking us with that? So we can just say that and not take you somewhere Okay, so this now this leads, opens this whole debate about what we mean by Nilla Lem The large language model and AI being intelligent without being alive And I'm asking you, do they dream?

36:56They definitely don't dream Definitely don't dream. So does that limit where it can take us Relative to where we can go ourselves? Okay, so we were talking about this before I mean, you should repeat that earlier offline That point you made, because I think it's an interesting one about what you can do with language So offline, when David and I were talking about, I said that With language, I can explain anything to you No matter what it is that if I can find the right words and you know those words Right, it doesn't make a difference what it is that I'm trying to convey to you I can do it and that is extremely powerful And then you said what? Yeah, so we're talking about the recent thing in the last week Everyone's talking about which is LLM solving a mathematics problem The singularities of the Navier Stokes equations is kind of stuff

37:56This dynamics of fluids And there was this long-last, you know, an outstanding question with a prize behind it About some properties of these equations Which is do they blow up and so on to have singularities in them And so outcomes in LLM recently Considerable expense, I mean tens of millions of dollars, thousands of agents It finds a solution But it's doing it by being fed text Not geometry, it doesn't have a visual apparatus So what does that mean that we can solve math problems by only being trained on language And that's what we were talking about And I think what we've discovered, the interesting thing about purely linguistic intelligence If you like, an LLM Is that you can solve almost any problem with it But you solve it very inefficiently And then you give the example of eating soup Which I thought was brilliant Well, yeah, you could eat a bowl of soup with a fork

38:56So you could Yeah, there you go Enough time, enough energy You can solve math problem with language, enough time, enough energy And human intelligence is based on a tough world where you don't have enough time And you don't have enough energy That's why we invented all these other languages to solve problems It's a very important distinction Plus we have, you know, a billion years testing ground to make it happen efficiently Exactly Because if we only got smart doing LLM's we would have burnt our energy load, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago We would have never gotten to where we are Yeah, we'd have a lot of knowledge sitting in the dark Right But that's an important point about why I don't like calling the intelligence Because they're very capable, they can solve problems But for human beings you don't call someone intelligent just because they're capable But I said, Gary, could you pass me that glass of water and you got them

39:58Ran around the room 20 times and they gave it to me We'd all say, that's kind of weird What's Gary doing? What's Gary's problem? He achieved the solve problem, right? He gave me the water At the end, you got the water And I think a lot of what they're doing now is getting up and running around the room 20 times And people are calling it intelligence It's just sort of benchmark, it's just a quality game No, it's just quality capability So that could implode because it could exceed our capacity to deliver at the energy it needs To solve that problem Exactly So there could be an upper limit, a functional upper limit Short of tapping the sun directly like we tap a keg But see if we were truly intelligent, if we were truly intelligent Then we would use this as a motivation to create that energy No, I got a better answer Go ahead If the AI were truly intelligent Oh god It would figure out how to do it Would you let's energy

40:58There it is, no you're right I got a mic drop What happened to my plastic mic? Where it is? You dropped it Wait and mic drop There you go By the way, do you just carry around a microphone? No, I just have stuff in arms reaching my office So... You discuss things called complementary and competitive cognitive artifacts Yes, wait too many syllables I didn't My fault And where does AI sit in which column? Complementary and competitive cognitive artifacts It's a two separate Yes, got it So take us there So this goes back in fact to a French philosopher, Henry Bergson, who debated relativity with Einstein as you know, right in the 20s But in 1907 he writes this book, Creative Evolution And he says, we shouldn't be called homo sapiens Why is he? Why is he? Right, which came from Leneas

41:59We should be called homopharber Humans that make things, humans that make tools And Bergson's whole theory was what makes humans different to the extent that we are Is we not only make tools But we make tools to make tools True Right So that has been somewhat neglected in this discussion of intelligence Because in some sense you can't really think of human intelligence without thinking about painting, symbols, writing Various kinds of calculating tools and artifacts So that's the background and that has its own development But in a quick question, yes we have opposable thumbs, yes we make tools Why should that alone distinguish anything when we don't know if Wales had opposable thumbs Would they be making tools themselves? They just can't But we do know that if we did not have opposable thumbs We would make opposable thumbs so that we could make other stuff No

43:00I'm just saying Just because they don't doesn't mean they wouldn't if they could That's true And there's a lot of debate about this I mean there was a lot of early discussion I remember on language which is whether or not the reason why other primates don't speak is there some an atomical constraint And if that wasn't in place perhaps they would have evolved language I was a position of the larynx That sort of debate involved in a lower position Exactly, so breathing It was a genetic mutation basically that enabled this That's nature So that's where it begins, this idea that humans make tools So I got very interested in that idea And there's archaeologist, French archaeologist, Andre Gauran And he said what are tools about? And he said there are, it's an additional memory system is what he said He said we've got genetic memory, stored in our genomes We've got learnt memory, stored in our brains And you've got cultural memory stored in language

44:01Stuff hard, stuff And so he actually argued further than books and he said to be anthropogenic is to be technogenic Wow He's indesoluble Look at that But somehow technology and humanity are kind of wrapped together in some way So that's where I jump off with this kind of mathematical theory of tools And the basic idea is that There are tools which I call complementary things that enhance our ability to reason Like a map, we talked about it last time You might even have an abacus in here It's through the abacus here Yeah, somewhere Okay, but that's a good example of what I call complementary And it helps you reason if you don't have it as we know from studies of Abacus schools, these kids can then do that calculation Don't even need it That's right Don't even need it in their head So this is the key point, the abacus is a scaffolding for thinking better

45:03Look at that Right? So now in the competitive case, these are tools that don't scaffold anything, they replace it So take a GPS versus a map Interesting So the idea is so you can develop this kind of theory And it says that if you outsource completely, you lose the ability to choose We are becoming dumber and dumber Because smarter we become The smarter we become, the more stupid we become Yeah, because we're replacing the accrued knowledge Oh, no Wait, wait, wait, wait, pause, pause, pause, pause, pause What? I have to restate what you said just so I believe I understand it In the case of the abacus, the abacus is a means to calculate And this becomes autonomic within me And then I do it, but the act of doing it is implicitly in reference to the abacus that trained me Now, also we have at least two or three generations of people still on earth who know how to read maps

46:05And they can translate what's on a map to where they are in the world There are no maps anymore It's just GPS, barking at you, turn left, turn right So I'll be ahead on the right And you're saying we are handicapping a generation of people who do not know how to read maps Even how to orient a map or what the legend is on a map There's no idea, but why is that a bad thing? Okay, so that's interesting So here's, so we've got... Did I get it right? Exactly right, okay, okay So that we need more vocabulary here than just intelligence, right? So we have, let's just introduce some terms One is capability Using a GPS or using a map both make you capable They both help you to navigate, no problem So benchmarks on AI attest in capability They can do it, they can calculate, they can solve problems, they can navigate Good, right? So that's capability Then there's competence, different Competence is okay, give me the GPS, now navigate

47:07And that reveals dependence And so what we're doing is we're moving into a world to when you say does it matter As long as you always have it Yes And you're not interested in competence But only capability And the problem is that gives you a wise to a world of total dependence on the provider of your capability Correct And that provider who I will not be named in this conversation because we know who they are Don't necessarily have our best interests in mind So I went through this intellectually some years ago I'm old enough to have, I think I'm older than you I'd to be formally trained, formally trained on a slide rule It must have been the last year that happened Because between that year and the next, the fourth function calculator Dropped in price from $200 to $40 So it became the price of like a textbook And so thence fourth, they stopped teaching you the slide rule

48:08And I got a slide rule here too This was my high school slide rule Alright, now there's a lot of sort of mathematical insights into the design of a slide rule And you learn about logarithms implicitly And then this is made a plastic But earlier I have a vintage model This used to make these out of elephant tusk And I think this is just wood But anyhow, in my high school you had a holster with your... And the bigger the slide rule, the more precise you can be in your measurements So we'd be walking down this math class and they did enough for the people in this But here's my point My intellectual challenge was If I'd never see a slide rule again because a calculator renders it obsolete What am I missing?

49:08And I said to myself If I'm always near a calculator You're missing nothing? I'm missing nothing And let me move on to some other thing that requires my intellect to solve So that was my coming of age to embrace a calculator And release the slide rule to the dustbin of history So yeah, in fact when Hula Packard made their first affordable calculator All of the slide rule companies went out of business The same year 1973 Yeah, right, that's when that's it That's it So there is something missing though, so right, so one possibility, it's a bit like vitamins Like vitamin C, you might say, you know what? I can't synthesize it myself But it'll always be in the environment until you sail and get scurvy So one possibility is we do find ourselves in a case of a situation where we don't have access to the technology And then we're useless because we've outsourced it all Apocalyptic Earth

50:08We're just dumbass Earth No, you know, a power cut A power cut, yeah Doesn't take much Okay But the other one that's interesting is that the intuition that you build Which relates Exponentials to multiplication and what the slide rule does That kind of intuition that came out of using that is useful beyond that solving that particular problem in a particular And that's where it becomes deep for us because we don't know Whether or not some of these things that we're learning by using these analog devices Doesn't somehow diffuse into everything else we think about And develop a stronger intuition And that's beyond losing the capability because there's a power cut Okay, let's show this forward How many generations, if just one generation, will it take if we outsource all of these sort of capabilities to an AI For us to be as dumb as a rock Yeah, so in the map... That's a depressing question

51:08So I can tell you that in the mathematics There's a key distinction to be made And that is that if you learn first, let's just do it hypothetically The slide rule and then move to the calculator Your memory kind of helps you out Yes So if you take it away, you still have in some sense some intuition for how that works But if you began with the calculator, that is you never learn the logic behind the calculation then you're lost And I think what we're entering now is a world where all of these kinds of things are being outsourced And you'll never require that Here's what I found I'm sorry, I was just going to say It sounds to me like what you're saying is these analog devices are mapping onto our brain That's what they are doing Whereas the other devices are replacing the brain and creating dependence Because not to get inside baseball here, but a slide rule implicitly trains you to think about what's called significant figures in a calculation

52:14I think about that all the time, you'll know I'm just saying So significant So you do this and there's only certain number of figures you carry with you into the next calculation You said 3.67894 or 3.68 Because you can't carry that many decimals forward by this device But it tells you that often those other decimals are not relevant to the major point of the calculation you're conducting I saw someone do a calculation on the slide rule And they somehow believed that all the digits that were returned on the calculator were important and wrote down every single digit Without having a clue how irrelevant they were And so that was just ignorance It is This idea, I don't know if it was Bertrand Russell who said So approximation is the supreme sophistication Learning when something matters and when it doesn't

53:16When these decimal places, when you can think about powers of 10 or approximation is a part of our intelligence In graduate school we have a recurring, it's like a seminar, it's called Back at the Envelope Universe You just ask a question, you blunt questions like how many pianos are in the world? How would you estimate that? How many have you seen, how many have you been to, how many people, are they making more? You don't have to know the exact number but get an approximate number and know how to make approximations If you don't know how to do that, you're a victim of false precision in the world Distracted by what you think is real when in fact it's a distraction on your path to the truth Oh, and this gets to a concept which I think is for humans as important as intelligence And that is the notion of intelligibility Not intelligence but intelligibility which is about understanding things And that's the other point, if you're in the world of capability, prediction and utility are all the matters

54:21In the human world, science is about making the universe and the world intelligible We want to understand it, different game, on that point If we don't outsource the capabilities and we retain a large chunk of what intelligence we possibly do have Are we going to, at some point, solve the problems, the big problems, the universe, why, how, what, are we going to get there or what we're just going to be clutching at thinner If we fully outsource you mean, if we retain, if we have an outsource completely and if we retain something tell it Do you think we're capable enough because you have said human intelligence potentially unlimited Because we need to be able to, yeah So, this gets back to Bergson and the others on tool use So humans are always hitching limits I mean, Neil just talked about the slide rule, you can't do that with your fingers And this gets to why we use tools, there are things we can't do and we build them

55:22We understand how they work and they solve problems that we couldn't in some raw state to solve So, in that sense, an LLM and AI is just a tool like any other And it's important to understand what kind of tool it is Because this tool is a tool that needs tons of data, most of our tools don't No, I am good Good point, I don't have to feed the slide rule to get my answer correct A little bit and they're very good and we can unpack this Doing high-dimensional problems where lots of variables matter So, think about protein folding Yes, right It turns out protein folding lots of variables matter And so, doing the molecular dynamics, the full computation modeling It's just two computational expensive And so, at an end come along, these models, actually they're not LLM, they're different kinds of networks, deep neural networks And they're good at doing high-dimensional problems And so, they help us, so they do protein folding And a lot of problems are going to turn out to require high-dimensional representation

56:23Lots of variables matter And they're going to help us solve the problem Just to be clear, everyone's on the same page, when you solve a problem, the number of variables can be thought of as a dimension How many dimensions need to be accessed to get the solution And multi-variate problems require vastly more computing power However, is that really intelligence or just brute force? Yeah, but so tell me the difference between the AI solution to the protein folding Previously, we have really powerful computers, give them the protein folding problem What did the AI deep learning neural nets? What was that able to accomplish that just sheer computing power wasn't? Yeah, prior So there's two factors here One is, and I'm going to go bit nerdy on you guys Bring it on Okay, we like it This is a nerd safe space

57:23Okay, this is okay, I'm going to say it Is that when you do these full physics simulations of a protein to get it to fold So you're looking at all the bonds formed between all the atoms Yeah This has something called a scaling relation, which is that the amount of computation increases non-linearly It goes up quadratically Yeah So double the size, more than doubles the amount of computational effort Okay Now it turns out because of some architectural feature of these AI models When you increase the scale of a problem, it scales linearly Ooh It has a much more efficient scaling property, this architecture So things that would not have been computationally feasible with the full physics Become feasible with the deep neural net That's a very important point Well that answers it right there And that's basically the answer Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah That's how for Fold3 These are Alpha Folds, the Sibis company We've had a couple of guys from there Yeah, they were on the show Now the other factor though is not just the scaling, which is a more subtle

58:25Is that you can feed all sorts of different data into these models So in the physics simulation, it's just the physics But in the folding, it's not just the physics and chemistry, it's the evolutionary history And so you can put all sorts of different data and drop it into these black boxes And that's the second source of that advantage over physics Well Every discovery starts with a question What if? Why? How? When it comes to education, Southern New Hampshire University has answers Whether you want to build new skills or pursue a lifelong passion SNHU has over 200 online programs to expand your horizons And the flexible format lets you learn on your schedule without putting life on hold So if you're asking, what's next for me?

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1:00:31Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime I'm Brian Futterman and I support start talk on Patreon This is start talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson Occasionally I lose sleep on this very talk Our humans intelligent enough However you want to define it to completely understand the universe With no stone left unturned And if we're not in the individual, in the collective might we be I don't have to invent calculus because Isaac Newton did So I stand on his shoulders and we just keep ascending this ladder And criminally, can we incrementally become super intelligent? Or is this the work of an AI that can train on itself and then just bullet past all of us to contemplate the cosmos?

1:01:33So I think we already know that we have limits I think the protein folding case gives us that answer That there was no theory Well that was a scale from the point of view How deep is your thinking? But I would argue that all of our hardest problems are scale problems And then let's give an example because it relates to this concept of emergence So we wouldn't have been able to do simulations of large numbers of particles Unless we had fluid dynamics So we found a way of making it more comprehensible And we don't have to track every particle To say that more precisely, the laws of fluid dynamics allow us to not have to track every single molecule of the fluid We treat it in an ensemble like the gas laws The gas laws are blunt equations that describe pressure, temperature, volume of gas We're not tracking what the particles are doing In principle, if you did, you should get those formulas out

1:02:34But we don't have to because we have the macroscopic description to continue Exactly, and most of human understanding once we hit this barrier given by the lower level in that case particles But you could be this case, it could be I'm feeling unhappy or I love you This is a macroscopic description Very macroscopic Of a very large chemical system inside my body And that's what we do every time And we consider that understanding, a form of understanding Now it turns out there are problems like pruning folding that we couldn't do that There was no macroscopic description We had to worry about all the molecular interactions And so this particular tool helped us to solve the problem Where there wasn't an emergent theory that would solve the problem Okay, so now this is AI being our agent in that quest It's not AI running a muck becoming a superintelligence on its own No, that's right, it's AI as a tool to deal with eruducing the elements

1:03:37Which I like to think our future relationship with AI is precisely that in every way that best serves us Not one where it becomes our overlord In recent decades, there's been a lot of discussion, especially in modern astrophysics, about information theory Is your limit to how much information is in the universe? Can we somehow create more than that? Does that information go away? Because the entropy seems to be a clock that we cannot stop With universe approaches ever greater entropy in the future than it does in the present or in the past Do any of your calculations touch on this? Yes, so two different ways One is about the fundamental limits to computation What gets called the thermodynamics of computation and that takes us to quantum and all that So right, there is a fundamental energetic limit So that would be the quantum computer would be in principle the most efficient computer we can conceive

1:04:37Exactly Whether or not we're there yet Exactly And then there's the other entropic limit which is the cost of calculating with a classical volume in computer The kind of computers that we all have, our iPhones and so on So we have these massive data centers They're consuming megawatts of energy Big jigger watt Big jigger watt They're boiling the planet All to make your emails better But it's okay because they're going to solve climate crisis Eventually This is fascinating, that's the whole thing in itself Right, yeah Once they've melted the planet, they for self-survival purposes Right, no, they'll figure it out They're going to figure it out Yeah, yeah And it's not just being co-pilot to your rating So that's the other entropic problem So again, I mean a long story here Maybe I want to, can I just give a little narrative that I think is useful historical one You're a guest Okay, so trying to make sense of what is going on in the current moment in terms of these kind of energy-guzzling AIs

1:05:43There's a useful comparison to the industrial revolution and to ecology So most of the history of life is predator and prey That is how energy got transferred, you ate something Okay In parallel in the carboniferous period And the mesosoiet period back there hundreds of millions of years ago Fossil deposits are being left in the earth The coming coal seems becoming petroleum and natural gas And that energy is not accessible to us Just there Then the industrial revolution happens And we get steam engines and they get more and more efficient And what steam engines do is they liberate all of this energy that was buried in the earth But wait, just to be precise Only when they discovered coal could do that Exactly Because otherwise you just Otherwise you just burn wood That's right, vastly less efficient

1:06:43But yes, the energy packing capacity of wood versus coal is no content No, I think the calculation is you could burn all of the standing forests of the world And provide enough energy for the current population for six months Wow, that's pretty serious And by the way, before we knew about thermonuclear fusion, we said, well It's a hoax The sun, you know, the sun is like really efficient And we knew there was a lot of carbon in the universe It must be a lump of coal That's a big lump of coal Because it was efficient and it could go a long time That was our first calculations where maybe the sun has made a coal Somebody should tell our president that right now Maybe we'd get to renewable fuels But continue, I interrupt it Yes, so we discovered super energy dense, power dense materials Power means you could liberate it fast Like in a nuclear reaction So the world changed It went from being networks of predators and prey Highly constrained by interaction

1:07:44To all of a sudden, this massive high energy dense archive that we could access That's the energy world So let's talk about the information world Nearly all the information we have, we get from talking like this It's a bit like ecology, predators and prey Or I'm going to tell you a fact, you could read a book Problem is with reading books, you read like I don't know, maybe 250 words a minute Over your lifetime, if you're lucky, you read a few thousand books That's how it works So what happens? So a thousand books, this is the number thousand books So just like in the Cambrian, right, or the Carboniferous rather And in the Mesozoic, where fossils were being deposited in the Earth We've been depositing tax in libraries Starting in ancient Summa, all the way to the present So we have now ordered hundreds of millions of books deposited And it's mostly in the present It's the rate of book publication has drawn exponentially over the decades Yeah, okay However, the knowledge also covers all of our past

1:08:47Because we've discovered our past in the present And deposited that information in the depositories you're talking about Exactly, but here's the thing The LLM is interesting, the LLM is like the steam engine I see where you're going Because what happened is... It's mining It's mining exactly It's liberating that energy Which is our literature Which is our language, which is our thoughts and cultures and everything that we are All in one depository that it can now go in The same way we went in and dug for coal We can go in and get all of that very, very quickly and turn it into power Exactly, exactly But this time, conceptual power Mechanical power So there's this strict analogy between if you like the fossil deposit And as you say, the cultural deposit The steam engine liberated the energy deposit The transformer architecture liberated the conceptual deposit Look at that

1:09:47Both of them produce what economists call euphemistically Externalities, in other words, they pollute So that's the problem with the industrial revolution It produces smogs It generate a huge amount of entropy in the environment Just as these data centers and transformers are producing a huge amount of entropy in the environment So there's this very interesting parallel in one moment And the culture Look at that, they're creating entropy not only in the environment but they're creating entropy in the culture itself Yes, wow Yes, so that's a really interesting point in the conceptual space Right The disorder is not just thermal, it's knowledge-based It's basically crap No, it's misinformation No, we call it agitation It's a flop, yeah So this is, there's a very weird thing going on here It's just to be clear, in the industrial revolution, not all coal or oil deposits were equally as refined

1:10:47Equally, I mean, different sources of oil in the world are not as good for... Not for a uniform deposit Not a uniform deposit, yeah, no, correct No, you're absolutely right You have lights, we crude, you have tar sands, you have... Yeah, go ahead Now look what happened, so we created, so out of the, you know, the Pennsylvania, now out of these deposits come all the big corporations of another era of out BP, Shell Right And the steel companies that use the coal, yeah Exactly, so now what's happened in the US steel? Well, we have our analogues, we have, and through it, we have open AI These are the mining companies of our time Look at that Right, generating the kind of entropy that you were discussing Yeah It's weird here that is worth discussing is that coal is depleted, natural gas is depleted But in principle, knowledge is not Right But there's a difference, which is that we can fowl that knowledge with the entropy in concept space

1:11:50Right That your point Now you could have done that with coal deposits, but it would be difficult Yeah, and why would you... Why would you write, right, right, right But now, unfortunately, we can take this knowledge, synthesize it, and put back crap Right And that's it, so it's different and similar in rather interesting ways Well, could be the crap, because it doesn't know how to do it, or is the crap because so much of what we do have in the library is just horseshit I mean, just because it's a book doesn't mean it is correct, or even contributes to the greater good of us all And the LAM doesn't know that, because it's not trained at a university to be able to sift the wheat from the chaff It just words statistically associated with other words and outcomes It's a probabilistic aggregation Oh, I like that But the difference is the crap that's in our libraries is an example to us of our journey

1:12:52And how we got to where we are So they become guardrails So that these are the mistakes, the thoughts, the things that we know That is horse crap Whereas the LLM without... if we didn't know those things, it would give us that and we'd just say, oh, here we are Wait a minute, if I say, what should I do with a witch? It goes back and finds all the literature on what you do with witches Which witches? Or you should obviously burn the burned them And this is how you burn them Right Whereas when you go to the library, you find out, oh, the witch trials were an attack on women Tell me about context Well, this is... I've been working on papers on mathematical ability in these machines Based on this notion of the chronology of the development of the concept So one really important difference between humans and these things is that we learn at school using a curriculum Right? Everyone... you typically learn what a number is before you learn like a natural number and integer

1:13:55Before you learn a fraction And then you learn fractions typically before you learn pi, real numbers And you learn that typically before you learn algebraic geometry or group theory or something will refine So there's a sequence, it's understood, we learn incrementally using a curriculum These models learnt everything all at once There is no curriculum Another question is, what does that mean for how we do math and they do math? And it means lots of things for how we do math and they do math And one of the things it means is this Which is that they basically find very complicated What we would call heuristic rules of thumb, approximations actually For solving problems that we solve exactly using algorithms, let me make that explicit So when I learnt how to do long division, assuming as I did it right, I'd get the right answer You have to learn how to do it right, but it's always be right regardless of the scale The current best models that are learned will not get it right regardless of the scale

1:14:58Guarantee, they'll get it wrong They'll get long division wrong at large scale, if you have too many digits Because they're using heuristics Right, and so part of our training was to learn these rules piecewise through a curriculum Their mode of learning is giving rise to a situation where despite the fact they look great At large scales, they're going to can fabulate And make wrong answers and we're not going to be smart enough because we've outsourced to them No, the difference Well this is what Geoffrey Hinden was saying that they're overconfident Yes So they're expecting now us to just take that for granted as the answer I always loved Douglas Adams, Hitchhake is guy to the galaxy And they build this supercomputer and they ask you what's the meaning of life, the universe and everything What's the answer? And the answer is fate 42 Yeah And you think What does that mean? We are now in a world where we could be told that 42 is the answer

1:15:58And we wouldn't know it in the next one Do you think the universe will allow a superintelligence to be created to evolve and therefore solve the mystery of the universe and hopefully it's not 42? And that presumably be an alien somewhere Yeah So we... So I have problems with the concept of superintelligence, I should just say If you buy my definition which is making hard problems easy It's not clear to me that the path we're on now is about making hard problems easy I think it's about solving some hard problems But doing it in a very convoluted way which I do not consider superintelligence That's number one In terms of I'm subscribed to the idea of kind of universal Darwinism Now do mean universal But... Correct it Any permission, I'm just saying And that in most life forms, however different they would be, would be living under conditions of scarcity

1:16:59That sort of prerequisite free evolution in the theory actually, because it's compete for scarce resources And so oddly enough, they will look more like us in their intelligence than they might look like LLMs Now it could be that alien intelligence is all that's left once those AI has devoured the life forms that built them In which case they will be more like LLMs But I think it's an important point to note that under the conditions that evolution takes place You want to be intelligent by having a small amount of data And quite restricted experience of the world And making a decision relatively quickly so that it actually enhances your survival And not using megawatts of energy to come to the surface So we can imagine a planet where the environment shifts with some frequency Like let's say you could program this so that you're always forcing an evolutionary change

1:18:00The organism never stays happy It finally settles in, you give it some assault, make sure you don't kill them all Because that's what happens most of the time But there's some portal that it can move through and start evolving Is it inevitable that that will lead to what we call intelligence? Or just more appendages or more senses or more... Does that give us the superintelligence that we're thinking? The biological superintelligence? So the open question is why we didn't just stay bacterial That worked pretty well It still works Still working, wait, depending on it And the way to think about this is that there is a fundamental limit to how information can be acquired by an evolutionary process Because a mathematical theory tells us that you can only put one bit of information into a genome every generation

1:19:00And as you get bigger, you get more energetically efficient Your generation time gets longer So at large scales, it takes more and more time to get a bit by selection into the genome Why? Because the way bits get put into life forms is through differential survival So imagine you had to learn... But why is it only one bit? Why can there be a suite of bits? Because selection would get confused about which bit it put in If we confuse about which bit was important for the survival of the victim Exactly, got it So for each and know the difference, it has to be one end So it's like a brick at a time Brick at a time So when you're very small, like a micro, a brick at a time can be fast But as you get bigger and longer lived, that's slow So what do we do? We evolve brains So brains can add bits more quickly than genomes can add bits That's why we have brains

1:20:00So there's two things going on, we get bigger to get more efficient energetically But it makes us slower evolving Which makes us have to have brains to pull information from the world when the world changes So there is a kind of underlying ratchet towards what we would call higher complexity And therefore towards greater intelligence Wow That's great though Because that means out there somewhere is probably another intelligence Along the same track as we But maybe there's a variable that they didn't encounter That keeps them from killing each other Destroying cultures and enslaving one another Although all of these stupid things that we do And maybe they're just so much more advanced Because they don't retard their own advancement Although everything he said about a species moving through Derives from in most cases composition

1:21:01And that's the form of limited resource What creates that other stuff that I was using And that's our reptilian brain Damn it You are onto something for a little bit there I've got a head, something No So... Well it does make it sound like there's some kind of plan Plan Yeah, rather than it's just random occurrence Plan Some kind of plan Well there are trends You could say there are trends in evolution I mean the question to York observation chuck is At this point where we could transcend the competitive basis of evolution By building AI Could we That's the way... Could we That's the pathway That's the pathway Unfortunately It's not what we're doing Yeah, it's not what we're doing Man, man, this is... I tell you, it's so much easier to tell dip jokes

1:22:02Probably not Probably not How long have you been at the Santa Fe Institute? About 20 years That's a long time It is a long time It is a long time It is a big part And they're famous or infamous for... Famous You hear what I was about to say For dangling people at the edge of what is known And exploring places that are just on the surface Crazy sounding But might be something profound So that's still kind of an operating principle Yeah, I think the history of science is risk And then it got institutionalized Yeah And it became a bureaucracy That was enforcing norms And SFI wants to be heterodox And to be... SFI, the Santa Fe Institute And that's a different environment To be in a high risk environment is a little bit going back To the time of early science I was about to say You're just taking a back to when science before we were on the show

1:23:04And people were just like Hey, try this We should do this Try this, smell that Look that Right Exactly And so that sounds like it could be quite fertile For people on the frontier with powerful imaginations for what could be true Yeah, I mean I think now Because of all these tools That are solving technical problems What we have to cultivate is amazing question arskers That is what remains for humans Right? Because it's like You don't need to be good at arithmetic once you go to calculator Probably don't have to be good at calculus anymore But you have to be able to ask good questions And that environment is something different So on that point Let's land this plane On a quote from a poem By the German poet Rainer Maria Rielke I think I'm pronouncing it right Okay Here it goes As quoted in my alien book

1:24:05Take me to your leader Be patient Toward all that is unsolved in your heart And try to love the questions themselves That's a great quote Yes That's beautiful And right after that she said Be have base of making your heart You couldn't help that Professor, thank you for it Thank you for it Yeah, another tour of duty on start talking It's wonderful to be with you guys Yeah, too much Too much to think about We have to think about it I'm out for two months now Thank you How do we find you online? Oh, you find me at the Santa Fe Institute? You find me at davidccrackhour.com There you go Okay Find me anywhere Just keep up with you Because we're doing fun interesting things Thank you I have a special appreciation for your evolutionary biology background

1:25:06Because I work here as an astrophysicist In a museum Same as for its evolutionary biology And so I have an extra little osmotic attachment to you Thank you It's wonderful to be with you To your work To people who keep him working Chuck Always a pleasure We're good here Gary Pleasure my friend All right, this has been another installment of start talk Special edition And we're going to call this the intelligence installment Are we or are we not? Until next time Keep looking up In the fight against all simers now matters more than ever Because now we have treatments Treatments that could change everything But now is no time to stop Now we've got momentum So now we use it Now we seize the moment Now we turn the tide Now we make a difference and make some noise

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