Professor Brian Greene: The Threat of AI, Consciousness & The End of Humanity

And I can't convince you that we're not in the matrix. Why? We could be. Is this table real? Am I really here? Am I a simulation sitting [music] inside some computer? Maybe there's a kid in 29th century Earth and they happen to allow you and I to exist sitting at this table. And here's a big assumption. [music] Can you create a computer program that has consciousness? Nobody knows the answer to that. But I've spoken to some of today's AI researchers who think that chat GPT is conscious. And in the back of my mind, [music] I do think it's possible. >> But if we considered robots to be conscious, would they then get rights? >> I think that's something we should think about now. Actually, >> Professor Brian Green, what is the ultimate question that you're seeking to answer? [music] >> We find ourselves thrust on this planet. We're trying to figure out why we're here. Is there some ultimate purpose? We're a little dot on planet Earth. And you begin to see our sun, one of many stars within [music] the galaxy. You can look at our Milky Way galaxy within the setting of the entire universe. [music] >> And what's beyond? >> Well, if the universe is infinite, if you go sufficiently far out into space, you're virtually guaranteed to find a copy of yourself out there. >> There's a version out there of me that just loves wine. >> There you go. >> So, should I feel insignificant? >> I would urge you not to because fact that we can understand that we are so small, that's what gives us [music] a sense of connection to something larger. Do you think it could lead us to God? >> If you mean the kind [music] of God our forebears often have spoken, that feels to me very much a human creation. I will tell you why I'm skeptical of that. But another thing we [music] should think about is the end of the earth because if we go arbitrarily far into the future, the earth is [music] going to spiral. It's not going to get scary. >> Well, it's scary the whole way. >> This is super interesting to me. My team given me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe and some of you have told us according to this that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you please could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe button if you are a regular view of the show and you like what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you, do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I've stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of the Dio, and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show. [music] Professor Brian Green, what is the ultimate question that you're seeking to answer? >> The ultimate question, I would say, is what is the true nature of reality? We find ourselves thrust on this planet and we look out and we're trying to figure out why we're here, what it's made of. Is there some ultimate purpose or is it just some interesting accident that allowed us to have self-awareness and ask these kinds of questions about the nature of the world? And I think that to me is the the deepest kind of question that we humans can ask. >> Do you feel like over the last 30 years of your career, you've gotten closer to understanding the answer to that question? Yes, but you know, it's kind of like picking up grains of sand on a beach, right? You pick up more and more and that that pouch of sand gets heavier. So, you're understanding is is deeper. It's weightier, but you look out and there's just almost infinitely more grains of sand that are out there. We understand the world better than we once did. But does that really take us some significant way toward assessing the big deep questions of say why is there something rather than nothing maybe that's the deepest question of all but which I don't mean empty space I mean nothing nothing at all >> well we'll in this conversation go in the pursuit of that answer to tell people who you are and to let them understand the journey you've been on academically and through your career Where did you study? Where have you worked over the last couple of decades? >> Yeah, sure. Well, I grew up in Manhattan, right across from the Hayden Planetarium. I would wander the hallways of the planetarium and come upon a meteorite and the universe was sort of my backyard because of that. And that really set me on a trajectory that I continued following when I went to college, went to Harvard and studied mathematics and physics. Then from there was to uh Oxford where I got my doctorate pursuing work in a field called string theory and then through the academic ladder Cornell and ultimately Colombia where I've been a professor now for 30 some odd years you know director of the center for theoretical physics at Columbia University. >> If you were to explain string theory to me like I was 12. >> Yeah. >> How would you do it? >> Yeah. I would simply say this. Your 12-year-old self probably knew that matter was made up of stuff called molecules that themselves are made up of atoms that are stuck together. And the the atoms are made of smaller things. Electrons in orbit around a nucleus that has neutrons and protons and neutrons and protons. They even have smaller particles, particles called quarks. The question is, is that the end of the story? Is it electrons and quirs and you're done? everything is made up of them. Or might there be a finer level of structure inside the electron, inside the quark? You take a powerful microscope, you look deeply. Would you see anything else? And the idea of string theory is yeah, you would. Inside an electron or inside a cork, you'd see a little tiny vibrating filament. And the different vibrations of the string yield the different particles. So much like a string on a violin, when it vibrates in one pattern, you hear it as a C or or an A sharp. >> The different vibrations of the strings in string theory, they don't produce different musical tones. They produce different particles. So a string vibrating one way, electron. A string vibrating another way, a cork. So matter at its most fundamental level, if you were to take a powerful microscope and look deeply inside of any piece of matter, you'd see all these little vibrating filaments, these vibrating strings. That's the idea of the theory. >> So two questions come to mind when you say that, which is how do you know? And the second one is what if you zoomed in even further? >> Yeah, good. Both good questions. How do we know? We don't. Everything I just said could be utter nonsense. I don't think it is. But the only way that you know if an idea in science is correct is you need to make predictions that you can go out and test measure and see whether you can confirm the ideas. We don't have the technology to look sufficiently deeply into matter to see the strings. We don't have the particle accelerators, the particle colliders with enough power to slam things together to access this finer level of structure that the theory is suggesting. So you might say then where do these ideas come from? Right? Answer mathematics. The power of mathematics is that it can take us to places that we can't yet go literally using equipment. When we look at the mathematics of quantum mechanics, the mathematics of general relativity, and we put that math inside the math of string theory, all of a sudden the equations work. They come together harmoniously, and we like, whoa, the math of quantum mechanics, we're confident in that. We have predictions and observations. The math of general relativity, we're confident in that. It makes predictions. We've confirmed through observations. Now we're willing to go where the math takes us. And the math takes us in this approach to these vibrating filaments, >> these vibrating strings. >> These vibrating strings. >> So if you pass me the string. >> So essentially, if you zoom into every cell on my body, >> Yeah. >> you will find that there's different shaped strings vibrating. >> That's the prediction. >> Correct. >> And what is causing them to vibrate in a certain way? Who's telling them? >> Yeah. Yeah. The idea is we recognize that the universe has energy. If you're to ask me where does the energy come from. Nobody can answer that. That is the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The something is a fundamental currency called energy. If string theory is correct, then that energy manifests as these vibrational patterns of the strings themselves. If the theory is wrong, then the energy manifests through other things like motions of particles and the way in which spaceime warps and curves. But if string theory is correct, the energy of the universe is manifested in the vibrational patterns of strings. Now when you say like who mandates that that string vibrates in one pattern, that string vibrates in a different pattern. If we go back to the big bang, the energetic explosion that resulted in space expanding, the detailed way in which that happened ultimately dictates how this or that string vibrates in the aftermath of that rapid cosmological explosion. >> Does this string theory idea tell us anything about why we're here? >> I would like to think that it does. It's very indirect and we are aggregates of a huge number of particles or if string theory is correct of a huge number of strings. I mean inside your body you've got something like a billion billion billion particles and if string theory is correct each of those particles is a vibrating filament. It is a gargantuan challenge to understand why those billion billion billion particles came together to yield you or me or somebody else. But again, that's a historical progression and I think we understand the broad outlines of that narrative that there was some initial event called the big bang that resulted in space expanding. The energy of that big bang ultimately transmuted into particles. Those particles were wafting through space. Gravity caused collections of those particles to clump together. Some of them clumped together into stars like our sun. Some of them clumped together into planets like our earth. And on our earth, some of those particles began to coalesce into more exotic and refined forms, giving rise to atoms, giving rise to molecules. And over the course of billions of years on our planet, those little molecules grew into more complex structures, ultimately giving first cells. And once you have a cell, cells divide and they come together into larger multi-ellular aggregates that give rise to the beginnings of life in the ocean. And those life forms evolve further until they can walk out of the ocean and begin to live on land. and they begin to stand upright and after a billion more years you and I are sitting here at this table and so yeah there is a story that's the brief version that takes us from the big bang to us on planet earth >> is it theoretical that this is all just a I was going to say perception but the other word might be a simulation of sorts theoretically we don't even know if yesterday exists or if it was just we were just implanted with the memory of it >> absolutely Hey, we're in this age of AI now. And I wondered if this insurgence of AI and how powerful it is and if you imagine it on a sort of an exponential curve, has it made you question some of your like fundamental assumptions about that overarching question of why we're here? >> Well, yeah. In fact, even before AI, we were tustling with the very notion that you mentioned, which is all we ever have access to is now, right? We can try to remember yesterday's now, but as you say, that's happening right now through patterns that are in my brain or yours that we think reflect something that happened yesterday or the day before, but that's a leap of faith, right? So, there's a kind of, you know, skeptical nightmare scenario where we begin to question everything. You know, is this table real? Am I really here? Am I a simulation sitting inside some computer right now? Are we in the matrix right now? These are the kinds of things which you naturally can come to when you take a deeply skeptical attitude to the nature of reality. Bottom line is I can't convince myself and certainly I can't convince you that we're not in the matrix. Why? We could be. It is logically consistent and sensible to imagine that you and I are sitting in some computer. Maybe it's not, you know, some dark dystopian computer the way it was in the Matrix. Maybe there's a kid in, you know, 29th century Earth who's in his or her garage right now and they came up this wonderful computer program and they're simulating historical episodes in the past and they happen to allow you and I to exist sitting at this table. I don't know how to prove that that's not the case. What I can say is if I'm willing to buy into that, everything falls apart. I can't trust any I can't trust my reasoning. I can't even trust my thinking that it's logical to imagine that individual because that individual may have implanted the false reasoning that it could be logical for us to be sitting here. What do I do at that point? And so, as a scientist, what I say is, I'm going to allow that as a possibility, and then I'm going to park it right over here. I allow it. I look at it every so often. I say, "That's scary, that possibility that we're in a simulation, but I'm not going to let it overwhelm me because then I'll be stuck." The simulation argument popularized by philosopher Nick Boston relies on probability. >> Yeah. Um, it essentially says that if an advanced civilization, which I would argue we're an advanced civilization, ever develops the technological capacity to run conscious highfidelity computer simulations of their ancestors, they will likely run millions of or billions of them. And because these simulated realities would vastly outnumber the single raw physical universe, any given conscious observer is statistically almost certainly living inside a software code rather than base reality. The big assumption is, can you create a computer program that has self-awareness, that has consciousness? [sighs and gasps] You know, nobody knows the answer to that. I' I've spoken to some of today's AI researchers who think that chat GPT is conscious, that who think that Claude is conscious. Now, I look I I talk to them and I'm respectful. That's the kind of person I am, but in the back of my mind, I'm like, are you kidding me? You really think that chat GPT has feelings that it thinks about its own existence and has anxieties? I think it can simulate that. But regardless, I don't think today's technology is there. Is it possible that tomorrow's technology broadly defined a year, five years, a hundred years really will yield self-aware, sentient artificial systems? Yeah, I do think it's possible. Now, not everybody agrees with that. I mean, no one knows, right? It's a logical possibility, but we don't know. Let us assume following Nick Bostonramm that consciousness can be created in a mechanical box. If that's possible, then Nick simply says, "Look, our progyny in the future, they're going to be fascinated with creating sentient systems." And so, they're going to create millions and billions and trillions of of sentient systems in the box. And they're going to get really elaborate and create a version where the sentient beings are led to think that they're on a planet. And in fact, they're going to do it a thousand billion trillion different ways. Some are going to be a planet like Earth. Some are going to be on a planet like Mars. Some are going to be a planet like around some star in the Andromeda galaxy. They're going to be an enormous number of simulated beings. Enormous number of universes that are simulated. So the question is if we have one real universe, let's say this is real, and a gazillion artificial ones that are created in various laptop computers of the future. We're one of a billion trillion zillion instantiations of people who think that they're real. Now, one truly is real. The other are not real. So, if you're just talking about odds, the odds are anybody who thinks they're real is not. The odds are anybody who's got a self-aware sense of the world is probably in a simulation. >> You used anxiety as a sort of a proxy for consciousness almost like the being able to feel these things. >> Yeah. I guess the question then becomes like what is what is it? What is anxiety? >> Yeah. >> Is it an electrical signal going through from >> I do think it is. I think that love and hate and anxiety and jealousy and gratitude and grief and all human emotion is nothing but electrical impulses going through our brains. And electrical impulse is just particles moving or strings moving along various connections. I think that is all that it is. Now, some people hear it and they're like, "Wow, that is a pretty bleak way of looking at life." We're these wondrous beings who can have all this emotion, right? The emotion captured by Shakespeare in the sonnetss, right? The emotion captured by Beethoven in the ninth symphony, you can't reduce that to electrical signals in the brain. And I say, "Yeah, you can. I really do think that you can. I don't think that diminishes the wonder of what we can feel and sense and articulate and express through the various ways that we have be it through music or theater or art or literature or poetry. Yeah, I am as aruck by our capacity to create as as anybody else. But in the end, I think it all does reduce to electrical impulses going through this gray piece of meat in this bone cage that's sitting on our shoulders. >> And if you imagine any rate of improvement from today, presumably at some point in the future, our future ances, our future progyny, you called them, >> yeah, >> would be able to create. >> Why not? That's my view. I don't think there's something special about the brain as a substrate. I think as long as you have the same electrical impulses, if they're housed in silicon inside a metallic box, I don't think that makes them fundamentally different than what's happening inside of our heads. Now, philosophers argue this, you know, psychologists argue this. They say, "No, no, no, no. It's not just the brain. It's the brain. It's the connection to the body. It's the tactile sense of the world. It's the olfactory sense of the world. It's the visual sense. It's only when you put it all together that you get the full experience of what it means to be self-aware, self-aware human being. And my view is well maybe that's true. But if so, give the artificial version tactile sense and alactory sense and visual sense. We will have the capacity to do this. And at that point, I just don't see a fundamental difference between the artificial version and shall we call it the organic. And so, yeah, I think there's a really interesting argument to be made that simulations will outnumber real worlds and therefore there's a chance that right now we are in one of those simulated worlds. >> Does it change anything even if that's true? No, I don't think it does. And I think that's the beauty. If I'm in a simulation, I'm going to live out my life in this simulation to the fullest. >> Now, I'd like to think that as a physicist, what I do, what my colleagues do is try to figure out the laws of the universe at large. But if we're in a simulation and all we're doing is figuring out the laws that the 15-year-old futuristic kid decided to impose on this artificial world, hey, that's not a bad way to spend your time, too. >> On this subject of AI, do you I mean, a lot of people that have sat here, people like Jeffrey Hinton, have told me that it's quite inconceivable that when there is a more intelligent life form on this planet, i.e. AI which is accelerating in its intelligence towards super intelligence and AGI and all these terms that these smart people use. It's inconceivable that we will remain in control. >> Yeah. >> Logically that kind of also stacks up. >> It does. But but I think there are alternatives. We tend to speak very much at the extremes, right? Humans are in control. AI is in control. AI wipes us out for reasons that might be benign or might be dystopian. It seems to me that what will likely happen is something more in the middle which is we are going to work with artificial systems. We're doing it right now and look how quickly we have acclimated to a world that would be unthinkable in 2021. There are many examples now, but there's a beautiful one that's on my mind. An 80-year-old mathematical conjecture. I believe it's called the Jacobian conjecture was solved very recently by a mathematician using AI. I see us blending with AI. Not necessarily that we have implants, but maybe we will. But there will not be as sharp a distinction between the biological intelligence and the artificial intelligence. And that to me, if that ultimately yields a new life form that no longer can be called human, that may be the way things evolve. And so evolution is something that is inherent to how we got here. Why would we think that this moment in the evolutionary progression was the end of it all? We weren't going to continue to evolve. And maybe the continuation of our evolution is in partnership with the artificial intelligence systems that we ourselves create >> that we give birth to. >> Yeah, it's us, right? It's our creation, you know, it's not an alien. We haven't been taken over. And so, yeah, I think that is a a real possible way that this story plays out. >> How do you feel about it? >> I am fine with it. You know, I think that we tend to become very attached >> to the way things are and we gain a sense of the way things are is the way it will always be. I think that's a natural way that we humans have lived our lives. Why? Because the time scales for change in our past have been relatively slow, right? We lived what 30, 40, 50, call it 80 years, 100 years, whatever. But the time scales for change were typically much larger than that. The time scales for political change and the time scales for technological change much larger. So as a species, we've grown accustomed to the thought that yeah, what we see is how it will always be. But of course, as we look back through history, we can see the changes. And so we're uncomfortable with change because we're unus to living through that kind of change at the kind of speed that we are and will continue to encounter. But I think we just have to get with it. Now look, I don't want AI system to wipe us out. Don't get me wrong. But I think if we recognize that change is happening, will happening, we can embrace it in a way that will have an outcome that will be acceptable, that will in fact be wonderful in the things that it will allow us to do. >> I'm quite curious. You talked about AI being able to solve that complex math problem. >> I'm wondering if with accelerating ever more intelligent AI, there's a bunch of other things within physics that you think might become possible in the near term. I mean, one of them I was thinking about, we can talk about some of the others that I have in my mind, but and any others that you think are interesting, but one of them is us being able to live forever. >> Yeah. >> Do you think we're going to be able to live forever? >> Yeah, that would be a that would be a good one. I don't think that death is inevitable in the sense that death can be thought of as the increase in entropy, the increase in disorder in a physical system. And when the entropy gets too large, the system can't function the way it once did. And that's really what we call death, right? That's really what it means. And so in principle, we can imagine harnessing some of the processes that have caused the degradation in the human body that have naturally resulted in us typically not living more than 100, 120 years. I mean, people like, you know, David Sinclair who I've spoken to about things like this. Yeah, you know, I think we can forestoall the kinds of degradation. Now, if you're talking to me, I think on time scales that are so much longer than a human life. I think about time scales that speak to the entire time frame of the cosmos from beginning to the closest that science can take us to the very end. And on those scales, I don't think that we will be able to forstall death. But please note the time scales I'm talking about are ludicrous compared to any time scale that we are familiar with. 100 more years, 200 more years, maybe 500 more years. I don't think anybody can really say for sure. I do think that is within the possible range of what science and medicine will ultimately be able to accomplish. And I will say though, you know, I I read a book I was about in my 20s called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. He was a social psychologist, I guess, sociologist who believed strongly that so much of what we do in our lives is driven by our awareness of our own mortality. And as I began to think more and more about that, it made more and more sense to me, which had a dual effect on me. very interesting framework to think about your life within the context of recognizing its finite nature. But the flip side of that is you're constantly thinking about your own death, you know, which, you know, is a a curious way to go about your life. But I don't think the denial of death that human motivation would go away if we live 200 years or 300 or 500. Yeah, we'd have longer lifespans. we'd be able to do more things. But, you know, if we live to 500, you know, as we approach 450, 475, we'll be thinking the exact same thoughts that we think now as we approach 70 or 80. It'll be no different. And so, from a fundamental perspective, yeah, I would choose to live longer, but I don't think it changes anything fundamentally. >> I find it quite interesting. I was actually writing a letter about this sort of an article to myself really about this yesterday about this idea of long-termism and how when you just change the time horizon of something the decisions you make today are different. Yeah. And a simple way of explaining this through the context of like business would be if I told you to build a business then I gave you one year and unlimited resources but you had to build it as big as you could >> you would take certain shortcuts >> and you would maybe not think about the foundations but if I gave you 20 years you'd really make great foundations and then you know you'd build up from there and I think about the same in our lives because we do have this sort of sort of inbuilt time horizon. Okay, I'm going to live maybe 80 years and then I'm 30 and then 40 and then kids and then I start to, you know, change and maybe at some deeper level we are making a certain set of decisions based on that time horizon that we wouldn't make otherwise. >> Yeah. I mean when I was 20 or 30, you know, even though I had this mindset that was inculcated by reading Becker's book, there was a certain sense of an infinite horizon that somehow was infusing your decisions, you know, to write a book. Well, that's like a four-year undertaking. But, you know, when you're 30, you're like, "Yeah, sure. Yeah, I'm going to do that now. I'm gonna choose those books with a certain kind of care, right? You know, there's a different kind of mindset that that is brought to bear. So, I certainly agree that the time horizon has a profound impact on the momentto moment choices, but the pattern that we humans go through from birth, you know, to adolescence, adulthood, middle age to ultimately old age if we're lucky and then, you know, we disappear. that pattern will persist regardless of what the ultimate scale of it is. Whether it's 80 years or 800 years, I think that we would go through a very similar kind of rhythmic variation in how we approach the world. >> If we were immortal, that would change a lot, but I don't see immortality in our future. >> What is the sort of the least inspiring possibility of the sort of answer to the big question of why we're here? And then I'll ask you the the most optimistic possibility. >> Yeah. I think the least inspiring would be if what if in the end of the day it's all just an accident. There is no deep explanation for why the world is the way it is. There's no deep explanation for why there's something rather than nothing. And if that's the truth, I'm on board. But it wouldn't feel as enriching as it might be if I can now jump to the other side of your question. You know, if there is a true fundamental answer to the question of why there is anything at all and I recognize that that answer dovetales with everything else that we've been developing. That answer ultimately yields quantum mechanics and yields the general theory of relativity and maybe even yields string theory. That would feel deeply satisfying. Why did our brain evolve? So we could get the next meal. So we could get shelter. So we could get a mate and have progeny, allowing our genetic material to propagate into our descendants. Right? This is what the brain was meant to do. And yet this brain can do so much more than that. It can figure out the equations of physics. That's that's a miracle right there. And so the deep gratification would come from this brain being able to figure out some stuff and then it dovetales with the deep explanation for why there's anything at all giving us a coherent narrative from the beginning until today and perhaps on into the far future. >> Yeah. >> Do you think it's going to happen? Do you think we're going to answer that question? >> I don't know. Nobody does. I think all vectors are pointing in a direction that suggests that there are real explanations that it's not just happen stance. There are these particles we mentioned before called electrons. Here it is my spinning electron, right? And so when an electron spins, it can rise to a little magnetic field sort of like a trillionth of the strength of the magnetic field of a magnet on your refrigerator. We can use the math of quantum mechanics to predict the strength of that magnetic field and we can do it and it comes out 2 point blah blah blah 15 decimal places long. We can do the math. We then can measure the magnetic field and it agrees digit by digit by digit by digit by digit with what we calculate. Our prediction is borne out by our observations to 15 decimal places. I mean that's breathtaking. We should not have been able to do that in some sense to understand the world that deeply with a brain that really was focused upon, you know, getting the bison. And so the fact that we can do that suggests to me that there are these deep patterns in the world that will ultimately stitch together into a coherent story. >> Do you think it could lead us to God? >> Well, or religion. Yeah, it depends what you mean by God. You know, if you mean the kind of God that our forebears often have spoken of and people today as well, a kind of anthropomorphized being, you know, sitting on the throne in some heavenly place. I suspect not. That feels to me very much a human creation and a wondrous human creation. And I'm not of the mindset, as some of my science colleagues are, that religion is an enemy of science and needs to be wiped. It can be, but anything can be an enemy of anything else. It depends how you use it. I see religion not as a structure that tries to explain the world in terms of its workings. I see it as a structure that tries to quell our anxiety, our existential anxiety. Where did religions come from? They came from our forebears recognizing that they would die. So you know our forebears had these elaborate rituals of burying their dead. There are these wonderful caves um in various parts of the world that have been excavated where the grave goods as they call it involving you know animal teeth stitched together care. It would take a single individual years to create the grave goods that are buried with an individual. Why would they spend the time on that? Well, they were imagining that death is not the end. That that individual needed those grave goods for their next journey into the afterlife. And why were they thinking about that? Because it's too terrifying to imagine that death is truly the end. And so from that you can see the glimmers of a religious sensibility emerging where we want to have something that suggests that death is not the end. So we invent these beautiful structures called religions and I say that even from a personal standpoint. I don't believe in any of the traditional religious practices. Right? I'm Jewish. I was raised sort of Jewish more culturally than religiously. Do I pray on occasion? Yeah, I do. Do I believe that I'm praying to an actual god? I do not. But the act of going through the kind of ritual that our ancestors did and giving yourself over momentarily to something that you imagine is being more powerful. I think it's deeply in our nature. >> So, who are you praying to? >> I am praying to the universe if I have to give a word to it. Recognizing that this prayer is going to fall on deaf ears because there's nothing else out there to hear it, but it makes me feel better. And so there's a part of my mind that's willing to allow the scientific understanding to have its place, but the irrational human side to have its place, too. What is the the most compelling argument or idea or experience you've ever encountered for a god like the ones we read about in the Bibles? >> Very little. Very little. You know, somebody died in the operating room and they were able to uh leave their body and see things that they could not possibly have seen and then they reported back when they were revived and people like, "Oh, you must have died and left your body." That's the only No, no, no, no. The human brain has this wonderful imaginative capacity to see things inside of its head that it doesn't literally see. That's what we can do. And so I've never seen a single example where I couldn't feel that I could give a logical explanation which was more compelling than the supernatural explanation. >> What about the big bang then? >> Good. So the big bang is a question of how it got started. Yeah. And over time we have been able to push our understanding ever further back. So in about 19 uh call it 29 or so Edwin Hubble who is a great astronomer noticed through powerful observations through the telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California that the distant galaxies all seem to be moving away. Interesting. Others, George Lmetra, who is a Belgian priest, as it turns out, who also knew Einstein's general relativity, said, "Well, look, if all the galaxies are moving away, just wind that cosmic film backwards." Back in time, they must have been closer and closer and closer together. Way back in the beginning, they must have all been on top of each other, and then everything running the film forward must have swelled outward in a big bang-like explosion. >> Let there be light. >> Let there be light. Yeah. And so starting in 1929, we began to have a scientific account of how it is that the universe may have been billions of years ago. And in our era, other scientists took the story even further, suggesting that there was an earlier era when the universe was just infused with a kind of uniform energy. You could say, where did the energy come? I don't know. But if it was infused with this uniform energy, they showed that the math required that the universe underwent this rapid swelling, the big bang. And so era by era by era, my point is we can push our understanding ever more deeply trying to get at cosmic origins. We have not been able to push back to time zero itself. But because we're able to push our understanding further back and make predictions about, for instance, what's known as the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is heat that we can observe today that was left over from the big bang. Big bang was very hot. The universe has cooled ever since for 13.8 billion years. We can detect the residual heat from the big bang. And so this gives me confidence that we're inching toward the answer to the question that you asked. Now, will we require God at some point? By which I mean, will we say we've gone as far as we can? Will we have to invoke something else? I can't say no. But I don't see any reason at this point to envision that we won't be able to push all the way to a full understanding. Most of us don't really understand um I guess how scale >> Yeah. >> and time have a relationship which means that you know I've been alive for 33 years now and it feels like a long time. >> Yeah. >> But I'm presuming the further and further you zoom out and the sort of the bigger the wider the scale gets time is experienced differently. So actually I could have been here for a second in a toddler's universe who's created the simulation. >> Yes. All of this is possible when simulations are part of the story. But if you put that to the side and just look at our universe, yeah, the time scales even there are shocking. I mean, Carl Sean used an analogy. He said, "Look, if you want to understand the time scales of the universe from the beginning until today, which is billions of years, like 13.8 billion years, he said, here's one way to do it. Imagine that all of cosmic history from the beginning until today, you compress it down to one year. >> Now, in that scheme, that means each day is about 40,000 years. But you can then put all of the milestone moments in the evolution of the universe on the calendar. So imagine you have the big bang is January 1st. Then the Milky Way galaxy forms like something around you know March 15th or something like that. And the sun and the earth form sometime you know in May you know and then the first you know life on earth is sometime in December like December 2nd and then you know the first modern humans they appear like on New Year's Eve right >> and then all of civilization takes place in the last 10 seconds right so like 11:55 you know it's the it's the rise of the Buddha 1156 the fall of Rome 1158 ate the Renaissance 11:59 like 1 second to the stroke of midnight you get modern science. So like modern science is like 1 second in this cosmic calendar. And so that helps you get a feel for the time scales that are involved when you're talking cosmologically because you're right, 33 years in a lifetime. You know, I'm I'm going to posit you're going to live to 99. Let's say that's oneird of your life. You know, that's that's not small. It's not big, but you know, it's a significant part of it. on cosmic terms 33 years it's zero it doesn't register that's how tiny it is on the scales that we're talking about cosmologically >> so should I feel insignificant >> you can I would urge you not to one of the reactions to all this certainly can be look we're a little tiny speck in space right I mean you can give the same kind of context for space itself Right. Because we're on a planet around the sun. The sun is one star of a 100red billion others or so in the Milky Way galaxy. >> Have you got a >> Yeah, I think there's a a little version of this thing here. If we can get this guy to go on. Right. Yeah. So, if you sort of start like here, right here we are in the studio. Right. And if here we then begin to pull out to planet Earth, like we're a little dot on planet Earth. And then if you pull out from there, this is Earth within the solar system. You begin to see how tiny we look even on the scale of the solar system. But of course here you can pull out further and you begin to see our sun, one of many stars within the galaxies. You only see a few here. But you know there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. And then you can go even further than that. You can look at our Milky Way galaxy within the setting of the entire universe that has at least a hundred billion other galaxies. So we as a little tiny speck around our star, our star is one of 100 billion stars in a galaxy that's one of 100 billion galaxies. That can certainly make you feel small in space. The beauty though is that our minds can reach out to the edge of the cosmos. The fact that we can understand that we are so small is what gives us heft. That's what gives us a sense of connection to something larger. I imagine that fish don't realize that they're like in one ocean of many oceans on the earth. That's one planet. I I don't think maybe I'm wrong and maybe the fish are like ah yeah yeah yeah you you know [clears throat] but but assuming that the fish don't know that they don't know that they're insignificant they don't even really think in those terms per se but the fact that we can do that the fact that we can realize how insignificant we are when you talk about the expanse of space you realize that there are other measures of significance and one measure of significance is your ability to understand your own predicament and the fact that we can do that is what to me is wondrous. >> How do we know we're not just that whole universe there isn't just a we're just a a microbe in the in the gut of a of a fish? >> Yeah, we we could and again that's much like this simulation argument. But let me give you an example in here that helps give you a sense of why we believe this stuff. This here is the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is the heat left over from the beginning. Now, it's colorcoded. The different colors correspond to different temperatures in space. This is a picture of space with a device that measures the temperature at each location and assigns it a color. >> How much of space or just a segment? >> This is a segment of the observable universe. The segment that we can see. Now, space can be much larger than things that we can see. That's absolutely the case. But my point is these tiny color variations correspond to tiny temperature differences. We can use mathematics to predict the pattern of the temperature variations. And what we predict matches this image to incredible precision. And so the fact that we can do a calculation right at this table with a piece of paper, a pencil, and a computer and generate an image that agrees with what we see, we say, "Look, yeah, we can be skeptical. Maybe we don't have the full answer, but that agreement gives us confidence that we've got something in the direction of truth." And that to me is what gives us something that counteracts the feeling of insignificance. >> And on that, if you just pull that up again. So this is the observable universe, which is I mean, how big is that? >> The universe is about 13.8 billion years old. So you'd think that the univer the distance we could see would be about 13.8 billion light years. The distance light can travel in one year. We can actually see a little bit further more like 45 billion lightyears. So you can think about this as here we are we look out billions of light years that way billions of light years that way billions of light years in every direction and this is like a big sphere that surrounds us and we're measuring its temperature. The temperature of space the photons that have traveled to us from about 300,000 years after the beginning. So this picture is a snapshot in essence of what the universe was like a mere moment in cosmological terms 300,000 years after the beginning. That is an amazing picture. >> And what's beyond? >> I don't know. I don't have any reason to suspect that reality radically changes just beyond the place that we can see. I think it's incredibly unlikely that the world is so consistent with our scientific understanding for it to all be a ruse. >> So, is it infinite? >> It could be. And if it is infinite, there are some really weird things. If what we have been talking about isn't weird enough, right? You know, if the universe is infinite, if you go sufficiently far out into space, you're virtually guaranteed to find a copy of yourself out there and a copy of the Earth out there and a copy of our galaxy out there. It's virtually impossible to imagine a universe that goes on infinitely far and doesn't repeat. You know, in fact, I see a prop here. I can sort of tell you why, right? So, here's a deck of cards, right? And I think it's a new deck. Yeah. So everything is in order, right? It's all perfectly ordered like that. Now, if I was to take this deck of cards and I start to shuffle it, right? So, you know, I'm not a particularly good shuffler, but you know, you get the basic idea. You know, I keep shuffling. And of course, the order changes every time, right? So, if I now, you know, I'm not a great shuffler. So, there probably still, you know, some things that are still, you know, in numerical order, but it's more mixed up than it was before. And I can keep on doing this. Now, sooner or later, if I continue to shuffle these cards over and over and over and over and over and over again, sooner or later, it will get back to the completely ordered arrangement. Why? Because there aren't enough different arrangements to go around. Right? That idea applies in the universe in the following way. In any region of space, there are particles. Those particles can be arranged in a variety of different ways. Here they're arranged so that you and I are sitting at this table and we got the cameras and everything. This is just a particle arrangement. There are only a finite number of arrangements of particles in any given region of space. This you can establish from the laws of quantum physics. So if you go out far enough in space, region by region by region, the particles will have different arrangements, but they have to repeat much like the order of the cards has to repeat. So there has to be a place out there. In fact, if it goes on infinitely far, if you imagine that I shuffle these cards infinitely many times, I'll get that nice ordered arrangement infinitely many times, too. Similarly, there are infinitely many copies of you, of me, of everything we're familiar with out there in the cosmos. And so, if the universe is infinite, it kind of challenges a little bit our sense of self, right? Like what does it mean to be who you are if there are other versions of you having the exact same thoughts? They had the same childhood. They had the same history because again that's just an arrangement of particles over time and it has to repeat. >> There's a version out there of me that just loves wine. >> There you go. Right. In fact, it's even easier, I should say, for the particle arrangement to almost but not quite exactly replicate what we're familiar with, which would mean there's a universe out there in which you and I are interchanged or you grew up in New York City and I grew up something. Yeah, because those are again almost replications. You got the earth, you got the sun, but the detailed particle arrangement is close to but not identical to what we are used to. So yeah, an infinite universe brings in some fairly strange ideas. >> But even in the observable universe, I mean this transitions nicely to the subject of aliens which people are um yeah >> very obsessed about. I guess there's two questions here which is why do we care so much I guess philosophically about aliens? You know, I think we at least in this country and elsewhere too, we love the idea of conspiracy. We love the idea that the deep state is hiding things from us. And by we, I don't mean me. I sort of mean the zeitgeist, you know, loves the idea of this Area 51, you know. So, I think there's a a a desire for there to be more than what's apparent on the surface. And wouldn't it be exciting if you know we've long known that there are these aliens they visited us and it's been kept under wraps. That's like the deep conspiracy that feeds that hunger for there to be something that is being hidden from us. Now I think the other reason is we're deeply lonely as a species. Sure, we've got people around, but you know, I think this sense, the desire for a god, I don't think is that much different from the desire for there to be other life out there. It's the desire to be part of something bigger. Now, if you ask me, do I think there are actually other life forms out there? I'd like to think of it in two ways. One, yeah, I think it's hard to imagine that we're the only life. I mean the more we look the more we find the organic molecules necessary for life you know amino acids nucleic acid you know the the raw material seems to not be too hard to come by in the cosmos so to imagine that there's other you know bacterial life or viruses out there that seems to me a reasonable working hypothesis but if you then say but what about intelligent life and by intelligent life let's just call us intelligent and it's debatable but let's just say that you know that is a harder question I mean even on our planet right it was an asteroid 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs and in that way opened up the evolutionary pathway by which we came to dominate in the way that we do without that it could still be the dinosaurs are grazing around on various plant life and other life forms on on the surface of this earth. And without that kind of accident on some other world, maybe intelligent life is rare or even so rare that we're the only example. So I don't consider that an absurd perspective as well that there is life, but there may not be any intelligence beyond us. >> Much of the reason most people haven't posted content or built their personal brand is because it's hard and it's timeconuming and we're all very very busy. And if you've never posted something before, there's so many factors in your psychology that stop you wanting to post. What people will think of you. Am I doing this right? Is the thing I'm saying absolutely stupid? All of these result in paralysis, which means you don't post and your feed goes bare. I'm an investor in a company called Stanto, which you've probably heard me talk about. 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When you're starting out, you need a players to grow your company, but you don't have 40 spare hours to spend sifting through interviews. So, you hire fast to fill the seat. But this ends up costing you even more in the long term. What any small business actually needs is a reliable and efficient way to find the right talent without stalling momentum. That's where our long-term sponsor LinkedIn and LinkedIn Hiring Pro can help you. It streamlines the entire hiring process from drafting a job description to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI powered interviews for initial screenings. Nearly 60% of hirers who've used this tool have found a candidate to interview within a week. Hire right the first time around and get started by posting your first job for free at linkedin.com/doac. That's linkedin.comac in terms and conditions apply. >> If one of your children came to you and said, "Dad, um, what is the what is the meaning then of this life? If we're we're alone in this universe, it's a gazillion miles away from anything interesting in the cosmic spectrum of things. What is the meaning of all of this, Dad?" >> Yeah. Well, they do ask. >> Oh, they do. >> You know, unfortunately or fortunately, because I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff and writing about it, it's sort of in in the familial zeitgeist at home, if you will. But you know my answer generally is I don't think that hovering out there in the depths of space there is the answer. You know I I think you know this this urge to look out and have the answer brought to us. I think that's needs to be inverted. I think that we need to come to the universe with our answer to that. And I think the charge of every sentient living being is to come to their own rationale for their life, their own answer to your question, their own set of activities and desires and achievements and relationships that gives their life meaning and combine to make me feel connected. One of the things that does make me feel connected is just knowing that the particles that I'm made out of existed at the Big Bang. >> Yes, exactly. Isn't that wondrous? You are the universe constructed in a way that you can reflect on the universe. Now, some would say, "No, no, no. We're special. We're like these divine offspring, you know, made in the image of God." And sure, I mean, I like the way that that sounds, but I find it much more satisfying to describe it the way you did. There were particles that emerged from the Big Bang that coales into a form that allowed us to momentarily, cuz we're here for a brief flicker of cosmic time, to momentarily reflect on our own existence. That's a connection. One of the things that actually helped me a lot through my life, funnily enough, is um is kind of watching what you just showed on the screen there, which was I watched a video when I was younger of them just zooming out from Earth. >> Yeah. >> And we talked about feeling insignificant earlier. Um I mean, there's some of them here. I'll just pick one at random like this one here. Well, it's just a a lady sat on some grass and >> she she zooms out further and further and further. And when I saw this, I must have been h it was a video like this one. I must have been about 14 years old. And at first I had the thought that a lot of people might have which was oh like none of this matters because we're so insignificant on the grand scheme of things that like what's the point? And then I I had this other thought which has stayed with me ever since which is it liberated me from worry. >> Yeah. >> Because if if all of my worries are just a speck in this bigger thing which are a speck in a bigger thing and a speck in a bigger thing it meant that I could take more risks in my life. Yeah. >> And not be encumbered by what will happen if and what will people think and etc etc etc which kind of liberates one to go and pursue whatever they want to pursue. >> Yeah. Carl Sean with the pale blue dot. You know if you're familiar with that terminology he he had the uh Viking spacecraft when it was going by Saturn turn around and take a shot of planet Earth through the gossamer rings of Saturn. And in that photo, the Earth is this little tiny pale blue speck, sort of as we saw in the film as it went by there. And he in this wonderfully poetic passage described how everything we care about, everything we love, everything we fight, the rivers of blood that have been spilled to conquer a tiny little fraction of a pixel in space. that gives you a setting where the concerns that you're mentioning of an individual human life of of countries of nations you realize how utterly small it is in the cosmological setting and again that to me isn't insignificance as you were saying it's liberation >> we have this um [clears throat] this spectrum of I guess confidence yeah in front of us here and on one end of it it says low confidence on this end it has high confidence and there's five little uh figurine type things there next to you. And what I would like you to do is to place them in line with your confidence that the thing is real. So the first one I'm going to ask you to place is those mini scales which represent free will. >> This guy here, free will. >> That's free will. Do you think humans have free will? Are you low confidence or high confidence? I'll push that further towards you so you can >> uh well uh I do not think we have free will and I have high confidence in that assessment which I guess means low confidence that we have free will. >> What is free will >> to me? Free will is really just the everyday sense that you are the ultimate author of your actions. that the buck stops with you when it comes to the decisions that you make for how you are going to respond one way or another in the moment to moment existence of life. I don't think that freedom of the will is real. And I can give you a quick sense why it really is an extension of everything that we've already spoken about, which is, you know, when I look at you, I see a man, but I also imagine that I'm looking inside you and I see your particles. And so, you are a man-shaped collection of particles. That is what you are. And each of those particles and the elomeration of those particles are fully governed by the laws of physics. I don't say that we have those laws yet. We have an approximation to them with Schroinger and Einstein and all those folks. But I do believe that there is an ultimate set of principles that guide how your particles behave. You do not have the capacity to intercede in the lawful progression of your particles. So if you raise your hand, it is not you who is doing that. It is the laws of physics guiding the particles in your brain, sending an electrical signal down your arm, causing your muscle to contract or expand, resulting in your hand going up. You don't control the laws that govern those particles. >> I didn't make the decision. >> You did not. You felt that you did. And so the feeling that you and I and everyone else have that we make decisions and those decisions result in our actions. It's a powerful it's a seductive sensibility. But no, I do not think that you are the place where that choice if you will occurred. The choice is actually within the lawful unfolding of the particles. And I can't control that particle motion. Therefore, I can't control the decision. Therefore, I don't control the motion of my arm. >> Therefore, I don't control my life. >> You don't in some sense if you buy into it fully. [snorts] It can be paralyzing. Or you can recognize it, which I do. And I say, "Okay, within that structure, I'm going to live my life as fully as I can." And I am able, not always cuz I'm a human being, but in the best of moments, I can pull back and have a certain objectivity about the things that happen in my life and I observe them at a remove as opposed to being completely wrapped up in the moment to moment. Now that doesn't make me an aloof person. It doesn't make me somebody who somehow is detached. No, it's just I can analyze the world at multiple levels. >> So who is and what is guiding those particles to make the decisions that those particles are making? >> The best I can say and I think the best that we can say right now is that there is some body of law. Now what does that mean a body of law? There is some patterns that repeat in the world. Now you drop an apple and it falls on Newton's head repeatedly. You can rely upon certain kinds of particle motion because there's certain regularities in the world. And the regularities in the world are what I mean by the laws of physics. They may be articulated mathematically. Our best guess is as of today that math is the best language we have for describing those laws. But out there, I think there are some fundamental patterns and those patterns ultimately are what determine how the particles move. And so that's all that we are. We are a body of particles that move and that's responsible for why things do what they do. And remarkably, our brains allow us to self-reflect, to look at what we do and analyze it. And when we do that, we tend to ascribe authorship to ourselves. But that's a story that we tell ourselves. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel part of the unfolding. It perhaps has an evolutionary utility that if you feel responsible for what you're doing, maybe it helps you to survive. Maybe that's why this way of thinking was inculcated over the course of generation upon generation. Maybe there's an evolutionary explanation. But fundamentally speaking, I don't think it's real. I was going to say then, well, maybe the the particles are trying to survive in this form. But even as I thought about that, I thought, so maybe my particles are making the decisions they make to raise my hand, to go on a holiday with my fiance, to have kids because they want to survive in this form, but actually I disappear at some point. >> Yes. >> But my particles don't, >> right? >> They then become dirt or someone else or whatever or child. It doesn't seem that they care much about necessarily being in this form. >> They don't. I don't think they do. So I don't think they care. I don't even think the word care is applicable to them. The notion of caring is a highlevel construct that only emerges when the particles are configured sufficiently to yield a complex information processing system called the human brain >> and consciousness. >> And consciousness. Now if you ask me where consciousness comes from, I don't know. sort of as we discussed before, I think it's just physical processes. Let's go with that. Assuming that's the case, this conscious self-awareness invents the idea of caring because it's a useful concept for us to organize our lives and our experiences. This conscious self-awareness in invents all the other words happy, sad, meaning, purpose, morality, activity, action, choice, decision, freedom, will all humanmade. These concepts don't exist out there in the universe. There's no notion of freedom of the will floating in space outside the Andromeda galaxy. This is a selection of ideas that we humans as a species have found to give us utilitarian advantage in organizing our experiences. That's all that it is. That doesn't diminish it. I don't go around trying to erase my sense of self. I accept my sense of self, but I also see it for what it is, a human construct. >> Does that mean that consciousness and everything that I am could theoretically just be, as you said earlier, in the sort of pessimistic version of events? Random. Totally random. like consciousness itself was just the particles came together over a long enough period of time and then they they found this form and now I can >> it could and maybe it was random and happened only once on this planet right I mean again maybe there is life out there and maybe there's even complex life out there maybe even like as big as us or bigger but maybe when we encounter those life forms they have no idea of what it means to have an inner world >> this I think it was a physicist said to me Uh it was a bit of a spiritual esoteric idea, but they basically said to me that they think consciousness could be it could come from this sort of original source and it's divided itself up into the humans, the bees, the birds >> to go out there and understand the nature of the universe. >> Yeah. >> And then when we die, we kind of return to the source. But you know, I'll give birth to a baby. They'll go off into different corners of the the earth and look at different things and have different experiences and it's all feeding back into this central consciousness which is sole objective is to understand itself. And it's funny cuz I heard this idea from this physicist and then I I was in a somewhere in Europe and I was driving down the road and I saw all of these tourists just like looking up at a mountain and they were just like looking out at the sea and they were looking at things that were interesting. Sure. Which is what we do as humans and I thought kind of makes sense >> that we're like we're actually just like consciousness. >> There's a philosophical position called idealism. And idealism holds that the fundamental truth of reality is consciousness. But fundamentally, everything that I've seen throughout my life suggests to me that that's not how it is. I can't prove it. I hope it's true. But if you ask me what I think is really true, I think that consciousness is something that emerges when there's a sufficient amount of information processing that itself is carried by the motion of particles through various interconnected structures. >> Is my dog conscious? >> It is, but I think it's got a different level of consciousness. You can tell when they're feeling good, happy, or sad or frustrated or intrigued. The ears change, the eyes change, the shape of the face. You can't help but ascribe an inner world to that. And again, I always worry that the dogs, like the fish, are like these humans think they're so damn special, but we actually are welldeveloped, well beyond them, and we're just playing along. In fact, in New York City, who picks up the poop, right? We pick up the poop. So, the dog walks along as like this, you know, king-like being, and we behind them with these little plastic bags. So, who's really in charge? But putting that to the side, I do think that the dogs and the cats have a level of conscious awareness. And I think you go down through the animal kingdom. If you were to ask me, does an insect have consciousness? Then I'm less clear. I suspect not. If you ask me whether a virus or a bacterium has consciousness, I don't think so. I don't think there's adequate information processing capacity in those structures to have the kind of rich inner world that we would normally ascribe to a conscious being, but that's all that I think it is. I don't think that there's some uber universal consciousness that's out there that we go back to when we die. Not that I wouldn't like it. I just don't think it's true. Moreover, I can understand why humans would introduce this idea. Again, it's Ernest Becker and the denial of death. How wonderful to say, yeah, our bodies die. Sure. But our consciousness, it doesn't die. Our consciousness, it floats off and it rejoins the universal. Wow. That makes you feel good. And we tell these stories that make us feel good. And there's nothing wrong with that. However, I do think it's important that we see them for what they are, which are human authored stories to compat our own recognition that we are mortal beings. >> Moving on to the next one is the universe there on the little card. We talked about this a little bit and you've given your answer already, but do you think the universe is infinite? >> I don't know, but I'm going to put it sort of around here. You know, in fact, lately I should tell you the work that I've been doing has imagined that the universe is not infinite. So, I've been doing a lot of scientific exploration with mathematics with a handful of colleagues and the kind of weird things that can happen if it's not infinite. And it's very interesting. There's a lot of mileage that you can extract from a universe that you go off in that way and you wind up coming back to your starting point much like you would on the surface of the earth. It's a finite extent. But if you ask me in my heart of hearts, if I was forced to make a choice, I would say infinite with a medium level of confidence. >> What about do you think life could exist outside of Earth? And I'll say intelligent life. >> Intelligent life. >> Do you think intelligent life exists outside of Earth? >> Yeah. So for intelligent aliens, I'm going to definitely go a little bit more over here. You know, I put it as uh it's possible. Obviously it happened once therefore it could happen again. Yeah. Obviously intelligence is not somehow contradictory to the way the universe evolves. It can support conscious and intelligent beings. But I think it may be special. >> Is there not a bit of a contradiction here though with these two things that you think the universe is infinite? >> Oh when I say this I should say within the observable universe. >> Oh okay. >> Yeah. So in the entire expanse of the universe as opposed to the observable part which again is a part that even in principle we could have connection with then yeah I would absolutely put in exactly the same place because there'd be copies of us out there. But if we talk instead about are we going to get a signal are we going to be visited then I put that at much lower confidence. And in fact, I I would say one thing about the visitation because you mentioned the interest that people have on aliens. I find it really odd that people are taken with these photographs that are meant to sort of just catch the alien ship as it was racing. If an alien could travel across the galaxy, say to reach us, they are so technologically advanced that the idea that our araic airplanes and their cameras could capture a photograph of them is ludicrous. They will be able to evade us in so simply that the idea that we just barely caught them on our cameras is is absolutely ridiculous. Moreover, if they could travel to us, again, I'm talking about traveling across light years, right? I mean, our galaxy, 100,000 light years, end to end, right? To be able to traverse that requires a level of technological sophistication that is so beyond anything that we can do. To imagine that beings that advanced would be interested in us. So interested that they would like kidnap us. That'd be like saying, "I was walking to the park yesterday. Don't tell anyone, but I kidnapped an ant. There's an ant walking along and nobody was looking and I sort of kidnapped it." We don't do that because it's not interesting. Similarly, we would not be of interest to the aliens because they're so incredibly advanced that this idea that they're abducting us is just ludicrous. Is it going to be possible? You know, we were talking earlier on about the possibilities that artificial intelligence is going to unlock. Is it possible within the laws of physics for us at some point when we get sufficiently intelligent to travel across the universe? >> It's a that's a it's a great question. It's a tough one. So, if the technological advancement was simply making our ships faster, no. Because even if you traveled near the speed of light, which is the ultimate speed limit, you know, to go to the nearest star, Alpha Centuri, it would take you four years even at the speed of light to get there, right? And then if you actually want to go not just to the nearby star, but to actually across the galaxy, again, you're talking a 100,000 years to do that. So that brute straightforward approach will not succeed. However, there are exotic ideas of things called wormholes you've probably encountered. These are these ideas of a wormhole is like a tunnel. What is a tunnel on Earth? A tunnel is a shortcut that gets you from here to here without having to go over the mountain, right? Tunnel it right through. There's an analogous idea that people float in the universe where to get from here to there, there may be a shortcut, a kind of tunnel that connects them and is a quicker way of getting from point A to point B. We don't know if these tunnels through space exist. We don't know if they existed whether we could actually get through them. And so it's a highly speculative idea. But if they do exist and if we one day can create them and manipulate and control them, then at least in principle we could take two distant locations like this corner and this corner. But imagine that we could manipulate this surface, fold it together to bring the two corners next to each other and build a little tunnel between them. Then we could go from one end to the other by going through that shortcut. That's a very far out idea, >> but there's no evidence of this. >> There's no evidence at all. Now, now let me just say again, much as we discussed earlier, this idea is not just some wild late night musing of a physicist. It comes out of the math of Einstein's general relativity that these wormholes could exist. In fact, Einstein himself in 1935 wrote a paper with a colleague Nathan Rosen where they introduced this idea that we now call wormholes. We're no further along in knowing whether wormholes are real than Einstein was back then. We've analyzed them. We developed the mathematics. You know, science fiction has taken this idea, you know, in Interstellar. I believe Matthew McConey, he goes through a wormhole. Jodie Foster went through one in contact. You know, they're they're a ubiquitous feature of science fiction trying to allow for the kinds of travel across the galaxy that otherwise would be impossible. But whether this is actually real, no, nobody knows. >> What about time travel? >> Yeah. >> Can can we travel backwards in time within the laws of physics? Yeah, that is the the the way of phrasing it because if you ask me the reverse question, can we travel to the future? I would say yeah, that kind of time travel we highly confident of. So I don't have a little thing for that. But let's call, you know, this is time travel to the future, right? I put it very very high confidence for that. >> You think we can travel to the future? >> Yes, in principle. Executing it a different story. But one of the things that emerges from Einstein's special and general relativity is that the way time elapses for you and for me is variable depending upon how fast we move and the strength of the gravity that we experience. So for instance, if I want to see what your life would be like 60 years from now, Einstein laid out a blueprint for how I could do that. I build a spaceship. I travel out into space near the speed of light. I go for a certain period of time, maybe about six months. I turn around, I come back six more months. I come back, I'm one year older, 6 months, 6 months. But you will be 60 years older if I traveled sufficiently close to the speed of light because my clock would be ticking off slow compared to your clock. Your clock went through 60 years while my clock went through one year. There is no physicist who knows what they are talking about who disputes this. Now, it's not controversial, but if you then say to me, well, do it. I'd say I don't know how to build a spaceship that goes that fast. At least not yet. >> You would only have aged one year. Correct. But I would have aged 60 years. >> Correct. >> Could you then go back? >> Ah, I don't know. And if you were to ask me to give my confidence on going back, I would say it's pretty pretty low. People have written proposals for how you could go back. They do involve things like wormholes. That is one possibility because if you have a have a tunnel from one point in space to another. If you then move the openings at different speeds, their clocks will tick off at different rates. This clock may be before this clock. So if I travel this way, I'm going one way in time. If I'm traveling that way, I'm going the reverse way in time. But again, like we said before, we don't know if wormholes are real. If they are real, you might in principle be able to travel back. But if you ask me, do I think that you can low low confidence that you can travel back? >> You've used the word Einstein a few times. Yeah. And I think uh this generation, you know, we we exist with AI now and calculators and all this incredible knowledge that has come from sort of standing on the shoulders of so many of these giants. Who do you think is the smartest person to have ever lived in your estimation? >> It's a tough one. People often make it an easier question by saying who's smarter, Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. And first my answer is when you talk about that level, it doesn't matter who's smarter. But if you really press me, I think I'd say Isaac Newton because Newton kind of went from nothing to develop the laws of physics. There were people before, but there wasn't really a mindset that the universe should be articulable in a few mathematical equations. And yet, here comes along Isaac Newton and he writes down the equation that we teach high school kids, F= ma, force equals mass time acceleration, which governs just about everything in the world around us non-quantum mechanically. He writes down the law of gravity f= g m1 m2 over r2 articulating how the gravitational force works and he was sort of doing this on he invents calculus in order to be able to use that as a tool for articulating the laws of physics. I mean he kind of went from no real architecture of physics to a solid mathematical formulation. Einstein came along and there was already a lot of physics. I think going from nothing to the first step that's hard to imagine. >> Was Newton to some degree like neurody divergent? How could he be so genius? >> I wish I knew the answer to a question like that like you know what is it inside their heads that allows them to do the things that just are superhuman or feel superhuman to us? I have no idea. Now Newton was a kind of weird fella, right? He was deeply religious as makes sense for the time. He was ultimately, you know, in the government tracking down counterfeits and and hanging them. I mean, there seems to be a certain kerogenly side of him that was also part of his genius. Uh he once reportedly took a a knitting needle and stuck it in his eye between the ball and the socket to see if he could manipulate sight through mechanical pressure. I mean who does these kinds of things, right? So he was a different thinker but clearly one who ultimately was able to see deeper you know and as you said you know standing on the shoulders of giants you know and there was a certain humility that came through. There's a beautiful quote where he describes himself as a boy playing on the seashore, having found a smoother shell and prettier pebble than most, while the great ocean of truth, he said, lay before me, all undiscovered. He knew that we were just on the shore, and we taken our first baby step into the cosmic ocean, and there is much more to be discovered. Is it conceivable that the next Newton or Einstein is going to be an artificial intelligence? Could it be Claude? >> Yes, it could absolutely be. Look, I I like to think of scientific creativity or creativity in general in sort of three main buckets. It's a coarse organization, but I think it's helpful. One bucket of creativity is the ability to see the landscape of possibilities more fully than a mortal human being. And there's a lot that emerges from the ability to do that. For instance, you know, if you're a chess player, you you can see the spectrum of allowed moves that are available to you more than the ordinary chess player. You know, if you're a scientist, you can sort of see the landscape of ideas and equations that you might bring to bear on a puzzle more than somebody else. And that is what allows you to achieve greatness. Artificial systems, they have the entire landscape, right? They've read the entire internet. They've read every textbook. They know everything that we have ever developed. So, in that kind of creativity, obviously, they're going to excel. And we've seen that a human can't beat an AI any longer in chess. A human can't beat an AI system in Go, right? I mean, this famous example with Alph Go, right? Move 37 has become this sort of iconic move where, you know, Lee Sadal, the world champion, is playing and you can see it on his face. The AI makes a move and is he smiles momentarily and he's like, "Oh, it messed up." And then his face changes because he slowly realizes that wasn't a mistake. Even the commentators, if you listen to, they were like, "Oh my god, the AI has made a mistake. What a blunder the AI has made." And then within 20 30 seconds, you're like, "Oh, oh, that was genius." Why? The AI could see the spectrum of possibilities more than a human being. So at that level of creativity, AI will win. Second bin of creativity, second bucket is putting together divergent ideas in a way that no one has thought of before and in that way making progress. You know that's kind of what Einstein did in general relativity. Put together Romanian geometry and Newtonian gravity yielded the general theory of relativity. But again, AIs, since they know everything that we've ever developed, can combine things in a way that we would never have thought of. The final domain is the one where somebody comes up with something that nobody has ever imagined, ever thought of. It's not just putting things together. It is radically new. That's the tough one. We're still able to win in that category. There are examples where people just come up with things that where did it come from? How do they think of that? If you develop an artificial system and allow it to have a life, allow it to grow up, put it in an environment where it actually has experiences of the sort that an Isaac Newton had. Could it be that that system then develops to a place where it can do the things that we'd like to think are exclusively human coming up with something that is not previously represented in the database on which the AI system has trained and so even this third more difficult or more pristine bucket of creativity could an artificial system do that I don't think there's a barrier >> I've done almost 700 interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world and one of the things you learn which is unexpected is that vulnerability is the doorway to connection and after sitting here for 2 three hours with a guest I feel a deep sense of connection to them and as they leave what I get them to do is to write a question in the diary of a CEO we've taken all of the questions from the diary of a CEO we have put the question here on this card with the name of the person that wrote it so you can sit at home as I do with my fiance and my colleagues at work and other people in my life. Whenever we get a minute, we play the diio conversation cards and it is incredible what happens. These are great if you're in a romantic relationship and you want to connect your partner more. These are also great if you're in a team and you want to bond your team together. And I have to say they're also great for families that want to learn more about each other and that need a good excuse to spend some time in a digital world in the analog environment connecting human to human. It is remarkable what the right question at the right time can do. Go to the diary.com and you can [clears throat] get these conversation cards right now. There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribed, you're already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribe, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much. This comes to one of our questions which is the skull there. Yes. Which is do you believe it will be possible to live forever and again I think about this in the context of AI where you said it will be able to understand that take us to the limit. It's hard to it's hard to understand um how that isn't a solvable problem. In fact a lot of the smartest people on earth including I think Elon Musk said it recently that living another 100 200 300 400 500 years seems to be within the laws of physics. Yes, I think that is absolutely within the realm of possibility, but 500 years is so different from forever. Like when I hear forever, I'm taking it kind of literally. >> Oh, okay. Yeah. >> And and so if if forever doesn't mean 500 or a thousand, if it means never ceases, then I have no confidence that that kind of existence will be possible. >> What about 500 years? 500 years. Yeah, I would say again not in our lifetime which is sad. I would I would put that at at reasonably high confidence that you know hundreds of years will be within our ability >> if we are on this sort of exponential of intelligence >> then it you know and if 2021 >> we couldn't solve that math equation you're talking about but in 2026 we can >> and you've got trillions of dollars now pumping into these artificial intelligence systems to make them smarter and more powerful. It is it is conceivable if we're on an exponential curve here. It could be within our lifetimes that there is a discovery made about our telmirs and whatever else it might be that the guests on my show have talked about. That means we can theoretically. >> But let me tell you why I'm I'm skeptical of that. Number one, right now we have a certain kind of artificial intelligence. It's basically large language models. And that's a certain paradigm where the system is trained on an enormous number of tokens, an enormous number of words, you know, basically the entire internet. And based upon the statistics and the statistics of the statistics of the statistics of how the words are arranged, the system is able to provide answers to questions that are coherent and and and insightful and so forth. there isn't necessarily an unlimited capacity of that kind of artificial intelligence to continue to improve, right? And so it's not obvious to me that it's just a matter of pumping billions and billions of dollars, building ever larger data center, putting them in space, wherever you're going to do, and the more money you put in and the more data you have and the more computer power you have, the better it's going to be. That's not obvious to me that that will continue up that exponential curve. And that's why I'm hesitant to say in our lifetime. It may take a number of lifetimes to develop the kind of artificial intelligence necessary to advance the kinds of scientific problems that you're talking about. But look, I'd be thrilled if it's our lifetime. I'd be thrilled if I'm wrong and these systems are up to the task. >> One of the terms that has emerged in the world of AI recently um is this term recursive self-improvement. Recursive self-improvement is the concept where an AI becomes intelligent enough to write its own software, design its own hardware, or train its own successes without human intervention. And once this loop begins, the upgraded AI uses its superior intelligence to build an even smarter version of itself, which then builds an even smarter version and so on. Because computer systems operate in seconds rather than human evolutionary time scales, this feedback loop could trigger an exponential quote intelligence explosion, rapidly taking AI from human level capability to super intelligence within days or hours. >> And the big AI leaders, Dario at um Enthropic has recently published an article warning that we're edging closer to that. Sam Alman has said the same. Dennis has said the same. Um Elon has talked about this as well recently and their timelines for this explosion in intelligence because of the AI being able to train themselves ranges from 2 years to 5 years placing them between 2026 and 2029. And Dario who's the CEO of the biggest model called Anthropic Claude um has stated that AI systems outperforming most humans across all human tasks including software engineering could arrive within two to three years and anthropic has been warning that full recursive self-improvement could [snorts] arrive by 2027 to 2028. Deis at Google is citing 2029 as a real possibility in Saltman says this decade. I mean Brian Johnson tweeted yesterday, "Pace yourself as if you'll live to 500 because you may [laughter] because you may." Look, I'm all for the possibility that these systems will take off in a way that hopefully we are >> uh hopefully working in a way that allows the kinds of future that you're envisioning that we are here and >> would it be a good thing? >> Well, you know, uh it would be seductive. I mean, if someone was to present you with the opportunity to live for to 500 years, I think many people would opt in for that. It's very hard to say h you know 100 years is enough and I just you know there are people who do that who will look at the world and say it's enough you know I'm I'm I'm done but back to the prognostications that are are being made. Look it's absolutely the case that the AIs will self-improve through the very process that got us here but on a time scale that's tiny compared to the time scale that got us here. I'm skeptical that by 2029 this will really be the case. Let's see, right? I mean this is a very short term, right? So we will know in a few years whether this is the case. >> How many years has it taken living organisms to get from a single cell microbe or whatever to understanding string theory? >> Yeah. So you know the first life on our planet formed roughly within the first billion years. You know, people debate exactly where that is. And you know, we're now roughly, call it, you know, 5 billion years in. So, call it roughly 4 billion years. >> And a computer going from zero to being smarter than every human on earth has taken. >> Yeah. Well, it depends where you where you start the gut. True, right? Because again, if you think about these systems as we they needed us >> without the internet and all the data, what would they have trained on? at least this version of artificial intelligence. If it's the computer, the artificial system that's self-tinkering, >> then yeah, there's this feedback that will yield an exponential growth. And if there's no barrier and there may be, right, there may be a barrier to the kind of artificial intelligence systems that we have. We may allow it to iterate, it iterates, and it sure it improves, but it doesn't improve like this. It improves like this. It could asmtote. It could approach a maximal intelligence compatible with this version of the artificial system. And so it won't skyrocket. It could do this. And we don't know the answer. Which curve is the right one? >> Give me a rebuttal to that. >> A rebuttal to it being the exponential curve. >> Give me a rebuttal. >> Oh, you're asking the system. >> That was uh Brian saying one of that. Give me a rebuttal to that. The rebuttal to the idea of an asimtote is that AI isn't just improving one thing. It's exploring an astronomically vast solution space of algorithms, data, and hardware configurations that humans can't even conceive of. Furthermore, each marginal gain in intelligence could instantly be reinvested into solving the very bottlenecks that might cause a slowdown, effectively breaking through the wall rather than hitting it. Maybe. But if all of these incremental improvements ultimately are limited by the kind of artificial intelligence that we are working within, then none of that will necessarily be able to break through. And I think this is something that we're just going to have to see over time. Fight back. That points to a crucial distinction about whether the current paradigm has a hard limit. While it's possible there's an invisible ceiling, it's also true that we haven't yet mapped out where that boundary lies. Meaning any predictions about a plateau remain speculative for now. >> Yes. And all I'm saying is there is a possible limiting ceiling exactly as you just admitted. >> Rebuttle that as well. >> The counter to that is the idea that an intelligent system could innovate beyond the current framework by recursively redesigning its own architecture. By altering its fundamental rules, it might not just reach the ceiling, but raise it altogether or bypass it into an entirely new domain of capability. But you do agree that the system that we're starting with may be self-limiting. I'm simply positing that as a logical possibility and therefore will have that natural inbuilt ceiling. >> Yes, absolutely. >> Okay, stop. I'm done. [laughter] Isn't that crazy? >> Yeah. >> It's totally insane. [laughter] >> Cuz even 5 years ago, we never would have thought that was possible. It would have been this. I doubt it. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally crazy. And and again, you know, just the flip side, even though I'm saying that there may be a ceiling, I also would say there may not be a ceiling. And again, it's both exciting and frightening at the same time because it's not obvious that we would be prepared for that. You know >> why? Why frightening? What would that mean? >> Well, you know, they're the usual doomsday scenarios that many people have articulated, you know, from these systems just having a single-minded focus on some particular outcome that may not ultimately involve us or that these systems may have a self-preservation instinct that prevents us from stopping them if they head in a direction that we're not happy with. I mean, Yan Makun, who's a, you know, he's a >> he's one of the godfathers of AI. >> Yeah. Yeah. His view is much more of the sort just pull the plug. If something's going in the wrong direction, just pull the plug. I mean, just stop the AI system. And it's not obvious to me and I guess to many of the other leaders that if these systems advance sufficiently far that they won't be able to stop you from pulling the plug. The other thing I would say and again this is not original many people have worried about this. You rattled off the names of the leaders of the current companies that are leading the charge in AI. There only are a handful of companies and a handful of people. Putting that kind of power in such a small number of hands has historically not with AI but with other power structures not always turned out well you know and so yes I think there is a chance that there's an instability that the power of these kind of artificial systems may generate >> so demis and I use demis because demis is running the biggest AI company said that since the design of machines is one of the these intellectual activities an ultra intelligent machine could design even better machines. If the exponential continues, which is not certain, but now has a decade long track record supporting it, then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything. The combination of intelligence, agency, and unpredictability is a recipe for existential danger. Not because AI is evil, but because it's complex in ways we don't fully understand yet. If a system can improve faster than humans can evaluate those improvements, the normal safety feedback loop breaks down. You cannot catch problems before they compound. >> He's absolutely right. You know, the the problem with exponentials is that they grow so quickly that by the time you see them, it's too late to do anything about it. I mean, what happens with a pandemic? With a pandemic, you know, it starts off slow. Nobody cares. Nobody's paying it. It's a story in the news. A story in the news starts. By the time it becomes a real story, the pandemic is at the part of the exponential curve that makes it very difficult to address the problem itself. And the same thing, you know, could easily happen here that the increase in intelligence, and I'm glad Demis phrase that way. It may not be that it's intrinsically evil to have this kind of powerful intelligence. It just may act in ways that are so alien to us, so foreign to us, so unexpected to us that we don't know how to deal with it. And moreover, it may not necessarily be beneficial to our existence. Now, as I said before, I'm perhaps a minority when I say I can imagine that we work with the AI and co-develop into something that we can't even predict today. That seems to me a real possibility >> and that's also the temptation. >> Yeah. You know, I have a friend Michael Douglas who's a brilliant physicist and he said to me, "We physicists, we should choose the final problems that we work on because within a few years we'll be out of business because the AI systems will just be doing it all." And that's both exciting and terrifying because as a physicist, you know, your your lifeblood is looking out at the world and finding puzzles and trying to find the explanations for them. And if you can just put it into an AI system and it generates the answer, yeah, there can be a certain existential angst about what your role is at that point. But it's also exciting because maybe we will get answers to questions that we thought we would never get in our lifetime. >> Did you say you're friends with Yan Lun? Yeah. >> And did you say he thinks we should just pull the plug? >> When you confront Yan and say, "Dude, aren't you worried about what's going to happen with this?" He's like, "Ah, don't worry. Just pull the plug if there's a problem." >> Oh. >> Yeah. His view is the difference between the AI systems that we have today and the AI systems that we need for tomorrow if you really want this to continue is they can't just be probabilities and statistics based on words. The AI systems need to have some inner model of the world as we do, right? I mean, if I take this cup here and I push it, I have an inner model of what it would take to move it without spilling. And I have an inner model of what it would take to spill it. I want to actually do it because it would make a mess. That's not just statistics and probabilities of words. That's a model of how reality functions. That's what he and many others have been developing. a world model together with the probabilities of large language model or some weird hybrid or something else we haven't thought of that may be the next phase of artificial intelligence but of course Demis and others might say the LLMs through self-improvement maybe they would develop that world maybe they would on their own get to the place that you would think that we humans would need to inject something extra who knows >> cuz if I like if I get this glass here. Say I say to the AI, "What happens to this if I push it in that direction?" >> If you push that mug, it'll slide across the table. And depending on how hard you push, it could knock into the plate or slide right off the edge. Now, again, it simply is relying upon the fact that it's read everything on the internet. And there are physics textbooks. There are conversations about things falling and it bases its response by drawing on those collections of words. >> Isn't that what I'm doing as well? >> I don't know what is how does human intelligence work? Certainly evolutionary psychologists have asked the following question. Are we like a blank slate >> and we simply learn about the world people tell us we experience and so forth or is there something more innate? And I think there is strong evidence that we have a kind of innate physical intuition about the world that's really been passed down through the generations. Not that you can pass down F= MA or Newton's laws to your children because you learned. Of course, that's silly. But there is an evolutionary advantage to being able to quickly assess the world and figure out how to act. Right? Those of our forebears who could not throw the rock or the spear, they're the ones who didn't get the next meal. Those of our forebears that had a slightly better predilction for ingesting experience and codifying it in some understanding of how the world actually works. They're the ones that survived. And so they can pass down that predilction. And I do think that that's part of how we assess the world. I don't think we're complete blank slates in that sense. would make sense. Babies are born with some kind of intelligence. They grip fingers. But but but that is in part because the the parent has passed that on and so an AI could pass >> Yes, that's right. When you talk about the AI systems themselves being evolutionary, yeah, they certainly do pass down the achievements of generation N to generation N plus one. That is certainly part of this iterative process without a doubt. >> What a weird world we're living in. >> Yeah, I'm so crazy. Some sometimes I think but I imagine through history everyone's thought like god what a time to be alive. >> Yeah we are living through a rapid change that is a little unprecedented. >> How do you think one should contend with all of this cuz people are concerned change is not something that we love at this rate. >> You know again I think people will cope in many different ways. You know if you can stay open and excited to the possibilities and have the flexibility of change. Oh, one of the things I've been thinking a lot about lately is Elon's out there saying that we're heading to an age of abundance. He's kind of shifted his perspective from this dumerism to age of abundance. And then part of his narrative there is we won't need money because when you've got robots and AI and more energy, then we're not going to have to worry about food and these kinds of things or bills, whatever. But still, humans pursue scarcity. >> Yeah. >> We we pursue status. We want, you know, humans want the home on the end of Miami Beach with the best plot. And there's those are there's finite numbers of these things that a lot of humans pursue. Even like academic discovery, Nobel prizes, there's a finite number of them and we pursue them. So there's one would argue that there's still going to be a a competition. Uh humans are still going to strive for things, right? >> Why do we do that? >> Yeah. >> Right. And part of the reason is if you know that you're going to die, if you know that your life is finite, there can be an urge to make your mark, to do something special, to be out of the ordinary so that in some symbolic way you continue to exist even after you are gone, right? I mean, you know, Elon Musk, yeah, after he's gone, people are going to talk about him for a long, long time, right? because he had a radical impact and who knows where it will go. He's got many productive years still left. And so, yes, there is this natural tendency to seek something that will allow you to symbolically persist after you are gone. Now, if we all realize that that is part of human motivation, maybe as a species we could begin to shift, right? It isn't the case that we have to always be the way we have been historically. That's the way we have been. Kings want to be kings in part because they have the power. If they have the power, they have the hegemony. They in a sense exist even when they are gone. Their progeny. Why do we have descent of monarchies? Because the king continues to exist through the king's progeny. And so, yeah, could we perhaps get to a place where we shed that way of being because we're in a world of abundance where the whole notion of scarcity is artificial and we're only inventing it, we realize, in order that we can feel good and special and maybe we can find other ways to feel good and special. I allow for that possibility. I'm not particularly optimistic that that's what will happen. On the flip side, I would say it's easy to say that money won't matter when you have a trillion dollars. Right. Right. I I mean, you know, you just have to sort of see this stuff in context, but yeah, >> we have one more little uh >> yeah, >> souvenir thing there. And this is kind of what we're talking about, which is robots. Do you think AI can become conscious is the question? >> Yeah. >> High confidence or low confidence? >> Yeah, I'm pretty high confident on that. You know, again, as I'm saying before, I just see consciousness as a physical process and it's a matter of in one way or another achieving that physical process in an artificial system. And I don't see a fundamental barrier to doing that. >> I was thinking about how laws would have to potentially change if if we considered robots to be conscious and they lived in our homes, would they then get rights? >> I think that's something we should think about now, actually. Yeah. It's a very tricky uh idea. I mean, you know, it's one thing, you know, to pull the plug on a on a light bulb. It's another thing to pull the plug on a sentient system. And we may well find ourselves in that situation. The the the challenge the challenge is it's virtually impossible to ever prove sentience, right? I mean, you know, as we look at each other, we each afford the other consciousness. I believe that you are conscious. You believe that I am as well. Why? You were more or less, you know, physically constructed more or less the same way. We're part of the same species. Uh, our body language, our speech is so similar in the grand scheme of things that we afford the other what we internally experience. But we don't know it, right? You don't know that I'm conscious. I could be faking it. I could be a really good artificial zombie that speaks and talks, but there's nothing going on inside. And the same could be true for you. And what that means is when we are with these artificial systems that don't have our lineage, they're not part of the same species. They don't necessarily look like us, they don't have the upbringing that we had, and so on and so forth. Will we be willing to agree that they're conscious if they tell us that they are? I mean, if the artificial system says, "I really am. I'm I'm feeling exactly the thing that I read about in your internet. I'm I'm I'm feeling love or I'm feeling depressed." If they say that to us, we say, "No, no, no. You're just mimicking. You're mimming the kinds of things that human beings have said. There's nothing going on inside. There's nothing. There's no world inside there. How do we ever get beyond that?" And I don't know the answer to that question. Even though I strongly believe that there's no logical fundamental barrier that prevents the system from saying that and from telling the truth >> and electrical circuits within that system causing it to behave in such a way when it's scared, when it's in love >> where it cuddles you and because that's what the electrical circuits told it to do. >> Yes. But is there an inner world associated with that or is it just going through the motions? Here's how I think it's going to likely turn out. We'll have these artificial systems. They'll start to say these things. At first, we'll be like, "Oh, come on. Come on. Come on. It's not not real." But we'll start to get used to them behaving just like we in the sense of having these inner worlds. And sooner or later, through a process that's so perhaps slow that we don't even notice it, we will afford them consciousness. We will talk to them as if they're conscious. We will imagine that they're conscious. and ultimately we will treat them as if they're conscious. Now, I hope that we do that in a in a good way. We have a terrible history of treating conscious beings in a respectful way, even in the same species, right? We've done terrible things to each other even though we afford consciousness. We do terrible things to animals. I'm vegan. I don't eat any animal products. I think that's not the way to treat a living system that has some level of conscious awareness. I do eat plants. I don't think plants have a sufficiently high level of consciousness, if at all, that I'm concerned about cutting them and eating them. >> Have you always been vegan? >> I've been vegan since 1993. >> Oh, damn. Since I was >> So, I've been vegetarian since I was 9 years old. And so, that's how I treat living or conscious beings because I don't think it's right to treat them that way. >> What was the catalyst for that decision? Well, when I was 9 years old, it was very flat-footed. My mother cooked spare ribs, and for the very first time, I realized what meat was. I'm a city kid. I grew up where meat was in cellophane. You buy it wrapped at the supermarket. But when the meat came on a bone, I was like, "Wait a second, what is that?" I was like, "Oh my god, this is like the rib of an animal." And I was like, and and I said, "I'm to I said, I'm never going to eat meat again." Later on, I did eat, you know, cheese and milk. I wasn't vegan at that point, but when I was a professor at Cornell in the 1990s, I went to an animal sanctuary in Watkins Glenn, New York, where they showed you what happens to these animals when they are treated like milk factories. You what happens to the cows? And it's it's awful. And within 72 hours after visiting that animal sanctuary, I said, "I'm done. I'm not participating any longer. I'm not going to eat or drink or embibe any living any substance that came from an animal. And so that was the end for me. >> For some people it might be somewhat surprising to hear that from a physicist. I agree it's inconsistent because if I believe as I do that you and I are just a collection of particles in one configuration and the cow or the pig is just a collection of particles in a different what does it matter if you eat particles in one configuration that we call a cow or another configuration that we call a carrot. But as a human being, I allow the other parts of me to shine through and I look at that collection of particles that happens to be a cow and I say, "It just doesn't feel right to me to eat that collection of particles. It just doesn't feel right and I don't want to do it." >> Brian, you've written many fascinating books. I've got some of them here. I think there's one other that I'm missing, I believe. >> Yeah, there's a more of a kids book, I think. >> Kids book. For my listeners at home, what is the most interesting thing that we haven't talked about that we should have talked about that exists within your works that I guess is re either fascinating or somewhat relevant to their everyday life? >> Yeah. Well, I'm going to go more in the fascinating than relevant to everyday life. As you know, I'm pretty esoteric [laughter] in these kind of things. But in the book Until the End of Time, I I tried to give the reader a sense of how we got here, but I also then turned to the future and tried to give them a sense of what we'll be if we go arbitrarily far into the future. And yeah, that's it. I used a metaphor of the empire state building which I I think helps you get a feel for what the universe will be like if you take the current understanding of the laws of physics and extrapolate arbitrarily far into the future. And so to try to give people a sense I asked them to imagine that every floor of the Empire State Building represents an era of time that's 10 times longer than the floor below. So like at the at the ground floor that's like one year and then the next floor 10 next is the 100,000 10,000 100,000 and so forth exponentially larger time scales as you walk up the stairs of the Empire State Building. Now in this way of thinking about things everything from the big bang until today takes you to just about here the 10th floor. We are about 10 to the 10 years from the beginning. And what I do is I take the audience from that point and I step through the key markers in the far future of the universe to give you a feel for what will happen. And I can sort of take you through a couple milestones, right? So again, here we are today. >> Stop when it gets scary. >> Yeah. Well, it's scary the whole way, you know. So here we are 10 to the 10 years from the beginning. If you just go up to here, 10^ the 11 years, what happens here is the sun will get bigger and bigger. It swells. It eats up the close planets, Mercury and Venus. It may swallow up the Earth, too. We're not sure, but certainly it will make life on Earth virtually impossible because it will be so hot on this planet. If you go up to the next floor above that 10^ the 12 years from the beginning, what you find here is that the universe is expanding ever more quickly, driving the distant galaxies away faster than the speed of light. So we won't see them. So a future astronomer here looking out into the deep night sky will see only darkness in the deep, deep night sky. Everything will have drifted beyond the cosmic horizon. Why will it be going faster than the speed of light? >> Because we have found surprisingly that the expansion is speeding up. >> And there's no limit to that. >> There doesn't seem to be a limit. Now again, there's always assumptions in every prognostication assuming that what we measure and see today will persist. It's like what the AI people are assuming that the growth that they see today will persist. Is that true? We don't know, but it's our best guess from the laws of physics that it will. If you then go up to about here, the uh 20th floor, something interesting happens. If the Earth is still here, if it wasn't swallowed up on the 11th floor by the swelling sun, the Earth is going to spiral into the dead sun because it will lose energy through gravitational radiation. Ripples in the fabric of space will cause the orbit of the Earth to decay. We will crash in to the dead sun. That will be the end of the Earth by about the 20th floor. But the end of life itself took place >> could easily have taken much earlier >> on the 11th floor. >> On the 11th floor. If we go up to about the 30th floor. What will happen here is that the stars themselves will spiral into the black hole at the center of most galaxies. So most galaxies have a black hole. We have one in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. And the stars themselves much like the earth will spiral into the sun the stars will spiral into the black hole which means there will be only kind of black holes as the remaining macroscopic structure in the universe. >> Has that happened elsewhere? >> Oh certainly we see things that can spiral into black holes in and certainly even in the center of our galaxy there's evidence that there's activity there and that activity in part is stars being ripped apart as they fall into a black hole. So this is pretty clear that this will happen. >> Is this the end of all galaxies as they spiral into the black hole? >> Yeah. So after 10^ the 30 10 the 35 years it's hard to imagine that galaxies as we know them will persist. The stars will have burned out. I could have even mentioned another milestone around the 14th floor. Almost all stars will have used up their nuclear fuel. >> All of them. >> Just about all of them will fade to black and >> all of them in the whole universe. >> Yeah. or at least the observable universe. I can only really speak to the part that we have direct access to. Yeah. And so by the 30th floor, those those dark stars will spiral into black holes. >> So there could be no life anywhere. >> It's hard to imagine, but let's be optimistic and imagine that somehow there is some life floating in the darkness cuz I want to get to something interesting on a two two more milestones. By the 38th floor, wherever that is, we believe that protons, which are the heart of matter, will likely themselves disintegrate, fall apart. And so, if there is any remaining organized matter of the sort that we're familiar with, somehow persisting somewhere, it itself will disintegrate by the 38th floor. That's our belief based on our laws of physics. >> There'll be no matter anywhere. There will be fine particulate constituents because when a proton falls apart, it doesn't disappear. It falls apart into other more refined particles and so they will continue to persist but the aggregate called the proton will not. If we keep on going to roughly say the 50th floor, this is an interesting point because imagine that somehow some conscious being still exists in the darkness of space. I don't know how it is. Dark clouds of particles somehow are having electrical signals allowing them some kind of conscious self-awareness. After the 50th floor, that conscious being will likely think its final thought. The reason is when you think it generates heat. That heat has to be carried away. It's very easy for that heat to leave us in a room like here because there's a lot of room for that so-called heat or entropy to be absorbed. By the 50th floor, the universe won't be able to absorb the heat generated by the process of thought itself. So any thinking being when it thinks one more thought will burn up. It'll fry in the entropic waste, the heat generated by thought itself. So by the 50th floor, it is hard to imagine any kind of consciousness continuing to exist. And that's why I said earlier when you said, "Do you think that we'll live forever?" I'm thinking here and I'm like, well, maybe we'll live to here like 500 years or a thousand years. But here, no way. It's hard for me to imagine that we will continue to persist. By the 68th floor, black holes themselves will begin to disintegrate. Stephven Hawking showed us that black holes are not fully black. When you take quantum physics into account, they can emit particles that will waft outward, causing the black hole to shrink. And over time, the black hole itself will disappear. A black hole the size of our sun with the mass of our sun about 10 the 68 years for that to happen. a black hole of the gargantuan sort that we think might exist, billions and billions of times more mass of the sun. It'll take about 10 to the hundred years, very top of the Empire State Building, for that kind of black hole to disintegrate. But by the time we get here, 10 to the hundred years into the future, we suspect it will just be detritus of particles wafting through an ever larger, ever colder, ever quiet universe. That's the future that we're looking at. >> And then when does the big bang kick off and it all start again? >> Well, it's interesting because you're absolutely right. You can say, "What about beyond the top of the Empire State Building? Now things look this whole thing is speculative right we are extrapolating from laws of physics that we've developed on thinking about physics here we're assuming that it applies all the way up into the exponentially far future is that true I don't know it's our best guess based on what we know today but definitely it is an assumption if you extrapolate even further then yeah you can imagine that way an exponential of an exponential of years into the future Sure. Sure. Could particles somehow recoales just by chance and build a state of matter that might generate another big bang and it all starts again? Yes, definitely within the realm of possibility. >> It's uh it's not the most appealing future. >> Well, I agree. But here, can I tell you my take on it? >> Sure. My take on it is when you realize that, you know, the far future is a realm of darkness and when you also realize that until life emerged, say on planet Earth, it was a kind of realm of chaotic conglomeration of particles, you know, before. So, it's as if we're living in a special time. We're living at a special region in the cosmological unfolding when living beings like ourselves and consciousness as we experience is compatible with the state of the universe. How wondrous, how spectacular that there is this brief window of time. I mean Nabakov had this wonderful saying that we live in a brief crack of light between two eternal stretches of darkness. How beautiful to exist in that brief crack of light. And that to me is where the gratitude comes from that I was mentioning earlier. You said earlier like what gives your life meaning and how the fact that we understand that we live in this very special era in cosmological history where for a small period of cosmic time living beings can stand up look around contemplate themselves and the universe and gain some insight and then it all goes away. But how wonderful that there is that brief moment that we are now inhabiting. It is wonderful when you say it like that. >> Frank, the thing that's I think is most special about you isn't just the extent of your intelligence. It's your ability to communicate in such a way that makes the complex both interesting and understandable. And that's what I've seen throughout all of your work and all the videos that I was I was told you I was watching your TED talk with my fiance a couple of weeks ago and um it's the closest I've ever come to actually understanding this concept called string theory. >> Oh, great. Well, I'm glad to hear it and thank you very much. Really appreciate that. >> I have a couple of your books here. I think this is the most recent one from 2020 called Until the End of Time: Mind Matter and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. And I think um you know, your work makes makes us feel so many things, but I think maybe the most important feeling it makes us feel is connected. >> Yeah. >> Um and I think we're all searching for connection in an increasingly lonely, isolated, feeling universe. And and so that's why I love to have these conversations on the show. I sometimes joke to the team that diio the C in it stands for like our one of our goals is to make people feel more connected in some capacity and you most certainly do that. So thank you for having that impact on the world. It's a it's a very important increasingly important impact to be having on the world and um it makes us look up not just down I guess and that's a that's a wonderful wonderful thing. >> Well thank you. >> I'm going to link all of your books below so if people do want to continue this conversation they can continue it through all of your books here. Is there anywhere else people can go to support your work or learn more about your work? Where would you direct them? considering World Science Festival, you know, uh world sciencefestestival.com. You'll find all sorts of conversations of the sort that we're talking about here. Uh also, I'm I'm working on a new AI. We're talking a lot about an AI education system where AI will help people understand these ideas better. It should launch sort of in in next year or so. So, keep an eye out for that kind of thing as well. >> Where do people follow you? Uh well, you know, on on Twitter or Instagram, we we post uh semifrequently, but uh more at our YouTube channel, uh World Science Festival. >> And in terms of these books that I have in front of me, I have four of them, different groups of people, which one would you direct them to read? >> Well, my favorite, if you sort of frame it in that flat-footed way, is Until the End of Time because it's the more philosophical and the more the kind of ideas that we spoke about here today. But if you know if you want to hear the hardcore of what string theory is or the new insights in space and time some of the other books are more directed in that way >> until the end of time. Mind matter and our search for meaning in an evolving universe. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question to the next. The question left for you is what might be worth even more than the thing that matters most to you? Oh, well, I would say the thing that matters most to the people I care most about, you know, the things that matter to my wife and my kids feels much more important than the things that matter to me most because I'm so involved in that relationship, you know. So, that to me is the thing that trumps all else, >> the things that matter more to them. >> Yeah, >> it's a beautiful answer. Wasn't expecting that, but it's very true. Brian Green, thank you so much. It's been an honor. >> My pleasure. Thank you. >> YouTube have this new crazy algorithm where they know exactly what video you would like to watch next based on AI and all of your viewing behavior. And the algorithm says that this video is the perfect video for you. It's different for everybody looking right now. Check this video out and I bet you you might love it.