Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1188 - Lex Fridman
Uploaded: 2018-10-25T00:30:36.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1188 - Lex Fridman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-10-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1188 - Lex Fridman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-10-25. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1188 - Lex Fridman

four three two one hello lex hey we're here man what's going on we're here
thanks for doing this
you brought notes you're seriously prepared when you're jumping out of a plane
it's best to bring
a parachute this is my parachute i i understand yeah um how long have you been
working in artificial
intelligence my whole life i think really so when i was a kid wanted to become
a psychiatrist i wanted
to understand the human mind i think the human mind is the most beautiful
mystery that our entire
civilization has taken on exploring through science i think you look up at the
stars and you look the
universe out there you had you know the grass tyson here it's an amazing
beautiful scientific
journey that we're taking on and exploring the stars but the mind to me is a
bigger mystery and
more fascinating and it's been the thing i've been fascinated by from the very
beginning of my life
and just i think all of human civilization has been wondering you know what is
in this inside this thing
the hundred trillion connections they're just firing all the time somehow
making the magic happen to
where you and i can look at each other make words all the fear love life death
that happens is all
because of this thing in here and understanding why is fascinating and what i
early on understood
is that one of the best ways for me at least to understand the human mind is to
try to build it
and that's what artificial intelligence is you know it's it's not enough to
sort of from a psychology
perspective to study from a psychiatry perspective to investigate from the
outside the best way to
understand is to do so you mean almost like reverse engineering a brain
there's some stuff exactly reverse engineering the brain there's some stuff
that you can't understand
until you try to do it you can hypothesize your i mean we're both martial
artists from various
directions you can hypothesize about what is the best martial art but until you
get it in the ring
like what the ufc did and test ideas is when you first realize that the touch
of death that i've seen some youtube videos on
that you perhaps cannot kill a person with a single touch or your mind or telepathy
that there are certain things that work wrestling works punching works okay can
we make it better
can we create something like a touch of death can we figure out how to turn the
hips how to
deliver a punch in a way that does do a significant amount of damage and then
you've at that moment when
you start to try to do it and you face some of the people that are trying to do
the same thing
that's the scientific process and you try you actually begin to understand what
is intelligence
and you begin to also understand how little we understand it's like richard feyman
who i'm dressed
after today are you he's a physicist i'm not sure if you're sure yeah yeah yeah
he always used to wear this
exact thing so i feel i feel pretty badass wearing it if you think you know astrophysics
you don't know
astrophysics that's right well he said it about quantum physics quantum physics
that's right
that's right that's right uh so he was a quantum physicist and he kind of i
remember hearing him
hearing him talk about that understanding our the nature of the universe of
reality could be like
an onion we don't know but it could be like an onion to where you think you
know you're studying a layer
of an onion and then you peel it away and there's more and you keep doing it
and there's an infinite
number of layers with intelligence there's the same kind of component to where
we think we know we got it
we figured out we figured out we figured out how to beat the human world
champion to chess we solved
intelligence and then we tried the next thing wait a minute go is really
difficult to solve as a game
and then you say okay that's i've i came up when the game of go was impossible
for artificial intelligence
systems to beat and have now recently have been beaten within the last like
five years right next
last five years there's a lot of technical fascinating things of why that
victory is interesting and
important for artificial intelligence it requires creativity correct it it does
not no it just exhibits
creativity oh so uh the technical aspects of why alpha go from google deep mind
that that was the the
designers and the builders of the system that was the victor they did a few
very interesting technical
things where essentially you develop a neural network this is this type of
artificial intelligence system
that looks at a board of go has a lot of elements on it there's black and white
pieces and is able to tell
you how good is this situation and how can i make it better and that idea so
chess players can do this
i'm not actually that familiar with the game of go so i can speak to i'm russian
so chess to us is
romanticized it's a beautiful game uh i think that there you look at a board
and all your previous
experiences all the things you've developed over tons of years of practice and
thinking you get this
instinct of what is the right path to to follow and that's exactly what the
neural network is doing
and some of the in some of the paths it has come up with are surprising to
other world champions so in
that sense it says well this thing is exhibiting creativity because it's coming
up with solutions that are
something that's outside the box thinking from the perspective of the human
when what do you
differentiate between requires creativity and exhibits creativity i think one
because we don't really
understand what creativity is so it's almost
it's on the level of concepts such as consciousness for example the question
which there's a lot of
thinking about whether creating something intelligent requires consciousness
requires for us to be
actual living beings aware of our own existence in the same way does doing
something like building an
autonomous vehicle that's the area where i work in does that require creativity
does that even require
something like consciousness and self-awareness i mean i'm sure in la there's
some degree of creativity
required to navigate traffic and in that sense you start to think are there
solutions that are outside of the box and
a system you use to create it it's once you start to build it you realize that
to us humans certain
things appear creative certain things don't certain things we take for granted
certain things we find
beautiful and certain things we're like yeah yeah that's that's boring well
there's creativity in
different levels right there's creativity like to write the stand the stephen
king novel that requires
creativity there's something about his he's creating these stories he's giving
voices to these characters he's
developing these scenarios and these dramatic sequences in the book that's
going to get you really sucked in
that's that's almost undeniable creativity right
is it so yeah it's uh he's imagining a world
what is it always set in uh new hampshire massachusetts a lot of it's maine maine
that's right
so he's imagining a world and imagine the emotion of different levels
surrounding that world yeah that's
that's creative although if you there's a few really good books including his
own that talks about
writing yeah he's got a great book on writing and it's actually called on
writing writing yeah if
there's anyone who can write a book on writing it should be stephen king uh i
think stephen pressfield
i hope i'm not saying the war of art the war of art beautiful book and i would
say if from my recollection
they don't necessarily talk about creativity very much that it's really hard
work of putting in the
hours of every day of just grinding it out well pressfield talks about the muse
pressfield
speaks of it almost in like a strange mystical mystical sort of connection to
the unknown because he he
almost i'm not even exactly sure if he believes in the muse but he i think if i
could put words in his
mouth i have met him he's a great guy he was on the podcast once i think the
way he treats it is that
if you decide the muse is real and you show up every day and you write as if
the muse is real you get
the benefits of the muse being real that's right whether or not there's
actually a muse that's giving
you these wonderful ideas and what is the muse so i think of artificial
intelligence the same way there's a
quote by uh pamela uh mccordic from 1979 book that i really like uh when she
talks about the history of
artificial intelligence ai began with an ancient wish to forge the gods and to
me gods broadly speaking
or religions represents it's kind of like the muse it represents the limits of
possibility the limits of
our imagination so it's this thing that we don't quite understand that is the
muse that is god
this us us chimps are very narrow in our ability to perceive and understand the
world and there's
clearly a much bigger beautiful mysterious world out there and god or the muse
represents that world
and for many people i think throughout history and especially in the in the
past sort of 100 years
artificial intelligence has become to represent that a little bit to the thing
which we don't
understand and we crave we're both terrified and we crave in creating this
thing that is greater that
is able to understand the world better than us and that in that sense
artificial intelligence is the
desire to create the muse this other this imaginary thing and i think the one
of the beautiful things
if you talk about everybody from milan mas to sam harris to all the people
thinking about this
is that there is a mix of fear of that of of that unknown of creating that
unknown
and an excitement for it because there's something in human nature that desires
creating that because
like i said creating is how you understand did you initially study biology did
you study the actual
development of the mind or what what is known about the the evolution of the
human mind of the human
mind yeah so my path is different as it's the same for a lot of computer
scientists and roboticists is we
ignore biology neuroscience the physiology anatomy of our own bodies and there's
a lot of beliefs now
that you should really study biology you should study neuroscience you should
study our own brain
the actual chemistry what's happening what what is actually how are the neurons
interconnected
all the different kinds of systems in there so that is a little bit of a blind
spot or it's a big blind
spot but the problem is so i started with more philosophy almost it's where um
if you think sam harris
has the last couple of years has started kind of thinking about artificial
intelligence
and he he has a background in neuroscience but he's also a philosopher and i
started there
by reading camus and nietzsche or dostoevsky thinking what is what is
intelligence what is
human morality uh will so all of these concepts give you the context for which
you can then start
studying these problems and then i said there's a there's a magic that happens
when you build a robot
that drives around i mean your father i'd like to be but i'm not yet there's a
creation aspect that's
wonderful that's incredible it's for me i don't have any children at the moment
but the act of creating
a robot where you programmed it and it moves around and it senses the world is
this is a is a magical moment
did you see alien covenant is a sci-fi movie yeah no have you ever seen any of
the alien films
i uh so i grew up in the soviet union where we didn't watch too many movies so
i need to catch up
we should catch up on that one in particular because a lot of it has to do with
artificial intelligence
there's actually a battle between spoiler alert two different but identical um
artificially intelligent
synthetic beings that are there to aid the people on the ship one of them is
very creative and one of
them is not and the one that is not has to save them from the one that is
spoiler alert i won't tell
you who wins but there's there's a really fascinating um scene at the very
beginning of the movie where
the c