Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1211 - Dr. Ben Goertzel
Uploaded: 2018-12-05T00:06:22.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1211 - Dr. Ben Goertzel' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-12-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1211 - Dr. Ben Goertzel' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-12-05. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1211 - Dr. Ben Goertzel

boom hello Ben hey there good to see you man yeah it's a pleasure to be here
thanks for doing this
yeah yeah thanks thanks thanks for having me I've been I've been looking at
some of your
shows in the last few last few days just to to get a sense of how you're
thinking about
AI and crypto and the various other things I'm involved in it's been
interesting well I've been
following you as well I've been paying attention to a lot of your lectures and
talks and different
things you've done over the last couple days as well getting ready for this it's
a AI is either
people are really excited about it or they're really terrified of it those are
the sort of it seems to be
the two responses either people have this dismal view of these robots taking
over the world or they
think it's going to be some amazing sort of symbiotic relationship with it we
have with
these things it's going to evolve human beings past the the monkey stage that
we're at right now
yeah I tend to be on the latter more positive side of this dichotomy but I
think one thing that
has struck me in recent years is many people are now you know mentally
confronting all the issues
regarding AI for the first time and I I mean I've been working on AI for three
decades and I first
started thinking about AI when I was a little kid in the early late 60s and
early 70s when I saw
AI's and robots on the original Star Trek so I guess I've had a lot of cycles
to process the
positives and negatives of it whereas now like suddenly most of the world is
thinking through
all this for the first for the first time and you know when you first wrap your
brain around the idea
that there may be creatures 10,000 or a million times smarter than human beings
at first this is a bit
of a shocker right and then I mean it takes a while to internalize this into
your worldview well it's that
there's also I think there's a problem with the term artificial intelligence
because it's that's it's
intelligent it's there it's a real thing yeah it's not artificial it's not like
a fake diamond or a fake
Ferrari it's a real thing and it it's not a great term and there's been many
attempts to replace it with
synthetic intelligence for for example right but for better or worse like AI is
there it's part of the
popular imagination it seems it's an imperfect word but it's it's not going
away well I my question is
like are we married to this idea of intelligence and of life being biological
being carbon-based tissue
and cells and blood and or insects or mammals or fish or are we married to that
too much do you think
that it's entirely possible that what human beings are doing and what people
that are at the the tip of
AI right now that are really pushing the technology what they're doing is
really creating a new life
form that it's it's going to be a new thing that just the same way we recognize
wasps and buffaloes
and artificial intelligence is just going to be a life form that emerges from
the creativity and
ingenuity of human beings well indeed so I mean I've long been uh an advocate
of a philosophy I think of
as as as patternism like it's the pattern of organization that appears to be
the the critical
thing and the the you know the individual cells and going down further like the
molecules and particles
in our body are are turning over all the time so it's not the specific
combination of elementary
particles which makes me who I am or makes you who you are it's a pattern by
which they're organized
and the patterns by which they change over time so I mean if we can create
digital systems or
quantum computers or femto computers or whatever it is manifesting the patterns
of organization that
constitute intelligence I mean then then there you are there there there's
intelligence right so that
that that's not to say that you know consciousness and experience is just about
patterns of organization
there may be more dimensions to it but when when you look at what constitutes
intelligence thinking
cognition problem solving you know it's the pattern of organization not not the
specific
material as as as far as we can tell so we can see no reason based on all the
science that we know
so far that you couldn't make an intelligent system out of some other form of
matter rather than the specific
types of atoms and molecules that that make up human beings and it seems that
we're we're well on the way to
being able to do so when you're studying when you're studying intelligence you're
studying artificial intelligence do did you spend
any time studying the patterns that insects seem to cooperatively behave with
like how leafcutter ants build these
elaborate structures underground and you know wasps build these giant colonies
and did you study how I did actually yes so I I I sort of
grew up with the philosophy of complex systems which was championed by that by
the santa fe institute in in the 1980s and the whole concept that there is an
interdisciplinary complex system science which includes you know biology cosmology
psychology sociology
there's sort of universal patterns of of self-organization and you know ants
and ant colonies have long been a paradigm case for that and I used to play
with the ant colonies in my backyard when I was a kid and you'd lay down food
in certain patterns you'd see how the ants are laying down pheromones and the
colonies are organizing it in a certain way and that's an interesting self-organizing
complex system
on its own it's lacking some types of adaptive intelligence that that human
minds and human societies have but but it has also interesting self-organizing
patterns this reminds me of the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem which was
published in the 60s which was really quite quite a deep novel much deeper than
the movie that was made of it did you ever read that book Solaris so what I'm
not familiar with the movie either
well so there was an amazing brilliant movie by Tarkovsky the Russian director
from the late 60s then there was a movie by Steven Soderbergh which was sort of
glammed up and Americanized and that was fairly recent right yeah 10 years ago
but that that wasn't didn't get all the deep points of the novel the original
novel in essence there's this there's this ocean coating the surface of some
alien planet which has amazingly complex fractal
and it's also interactive like the patterns of organization on the ocean
respond based on what you do and when people get near the ocean it causes them
to hallucinate things and even cause them to see simulacra of people from their
past even the like the person who they had most harmed or injured in their past
appears and interacts with them so clearly this ocean has some type of amazing
complexity and intelligence from the patterns it displays
and from the weird things that reeks in your mind so that the people on earth
try to understand how the ocean is thinking they send a scientific expedition
there to to interact with that ocean but it's just so alien even though it
monkeys with people's minds and clearly is doing complex things no two-way
communication is ever is ever established and eventually the human
the human expedition gives up and goes home so it's a very Russian ending to
the novel I guess it's not I think I saw that but that the
the interest the interesting message there is I mean there can be many many
kinds of intelligence right I mean human intelligence is one thing the
intelligence of an ant colony is a different thing the intelligence of human
society is a different thing ecosystem is a different thing
yeah
and there could be many many types of AIs that we could build with many many
different properties some could be wonderful to human beings some could be
horrible to human beings some could just be alien minds that that we can't even
relate relate relate to very very well so we we have a very limited conception
of what an intelligence is if we just think by close
what an intelligence is if we can be able to build with human beings and to
human beings and this this is important if you're thinking about engineering or
growing artificial light forms or artificial minds because it's not just can we
do this it's what kind of mind are we going to engineer or evolve and there's a
there's a huge spectrum of possibilities
Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I asked you that. If we had created, if
human beings had created some sort of an insect, and this insect started
organizing and developing these complex colonies like a leafcutter ant and
building these structures underground, people would go crazy. They would panic.
They would think these things are organizing. They're going to build up their
resources and attack us. They're going to try to take over humanity.
I mean, what people are worried about more than anything when it comes to
technology, I think, is the idea that we're going to be irrelevant, that we're
going to be antiques, and that something new and better is going to take our
place, which is a weird thing to worry about.
Which is almost an abnormal.
Yeah, it's a weird thing to worry about it because it's sort of the history of
biological life on Earth. I mean, what we know is there's complex things. They
become more complex. We go single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms.
There seems to be a pattern leading up to us, and us with this unprecedented
ability to change our environment. That's what we can do, right? We can
manipulate things, poison the environment. We can blow up entire countries with
bombs if we'd like to, and we can also do wild, creative things like send
signals through space and land on someone else's phone on the other side of the
world almost instantaneously.
Absolutely. We have incredible power, but we're also so limited by our biology.
The thing I think people are afraid of, and I'm afraid of, but I don't know if
it makes any sense, is that the next level of life, whatever artificial life is,
or whatever the human symbiote is, that it's going to lack emotions, it's going
to lack desires and needs, and all the things that we think are special about
us.
Our creativity, our desire for attention and love, all of our camaraderie, all
these different things that are sort of programmed into us with our genetics in
order to advance our species, that we're so connected to these things.
But they're the reason for lies, deception, thievery, there's so many things
that are built into being a person that are responsible for all the woes of
humanity, but we're afraid to lose those things.
I think it's almost inevitable by this point that humanity is going to create
synthetic intelligences with tremendously greater general intelligence and
practical capability than human beings have.
I mean, I think I know how to do that with the software I'm working on with my
own team, but if we fail, you know, there's a load of other teams who I think
are a bit behind us, but they're going in the same direction now, right?
So you guys feel like you're at the tip of the spear with this stuff?
I do, but I also think that's not the most important thing from a human
perspective.
The most important thing is that humanity as a whole is quite close to this
threshold event, right?
How far do you think it's quite close?
By my own gut feeling, five to 30 years, let's say.
That's pretty close.
But if I'm wrong and it's 100 years, like in the historical timescale, that
sort of doesn't matter.
It's like, did the Sumerians create civilization 10,000 or 10,050 years ago?
Like, what difference does it make, right?
So I think we're quite close to creating superhuman artificial general
intelligence.
And that's, in a way, almost inevitable, given where we are now.
On the other hand, I think we still have some agency regarding whether this
comes out in a way that, you know, respects human values and culture, which are
important to us now, given who and what we are.
Or that is essentially indifferent to human values and culture in the same way
that we're mostly indifferent to chimpanzee 