Max Tegmark is a physicist and AI researcher at MIT, co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, and author of Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Max's Twitter: https://twitter.com/tegmark
Max's Website: https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark
Pause Giant AI Experiments (open letter): https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments
Future of Life Institute: https://futureoflife.org
Books and resources mentioned:
1. Life 3.0 (book): https://amzn.to/3UB9rXB
2. Meditations on Moloch (essay): https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch
3. Nuclear winter paper: https://nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0

PODCAST INFO:
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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:56 - Intelligent alien civilizations
14:20 - Life 3.0 and superintelligent AI
25:47 - Open letter to pause Giant AI Experiments
50:54 - Maintaining control
1:19:44 - Regulation
1:30:34 - Job automation
1:39:48 - Elon Musk
2:01:31 - Open source
2:08:01 - How AI may kill all humans
2:18:32 - Consciousness
2:27:54 - Nuclear winter
2:38:21 - Questions for AGI

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A lot of people have said for many years that there will come a time when we want to pause a little bit.

The following is a conversation with Max Tegmark, his third time on the podcast.

In fact, his first appearance was episode number 1 of this very podcast.

He is a physicist and artificial intelligence researcher at MIT, co-founder of Future Life Institute, and author of Life 3.0, Being human in the age of artificial intelligence.

Most recently, he's a key figure in spearheading the open letter calling for a 6 month pause on giant AI experiments like training GPT-4.

The letter reads, We're calling for a pause on training of models larger than GPT-4 for 6 months.

This does not imply a pause or ban on all AI research and development or the use of systems that have already been placed on the market.

Our call is specific and addresses a very small pool of actors who possess this capability.

The letter has been signed by over 50, 000 individuals, including 1, 800 CEOs and over 1, 500 professors.

Signatories include Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Harari, Andrew Yang, and many others.

This is a defining moment in the history of human civilization, where the balance of power between human and AI begins to shift.

And Max's mind and his voice is 1 of the most valuable and powerful in a time like this.

His support, his wisdom, his friendship has been a gift I'm forever deeply grateful for.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Max Tegmark.

You were the first ever guest on this podcast, episode number 1.

So first of all, Max, I just have to say, thank you for giving me a chance.

Just thank you for sitting down with me and just acting like I'm somebody who matters, that I'm somebody who's interesting to talk to.

Thanks to you for putting your heart and soul into this.

I know when you delve into controversial topics, it's inevitable to get hit by what Hamlet talks about, the slings and arrows and stuff, And I really admire this.

It's in an era where YouTube videos are too long and now it has to be like a 20-minute TikTok, 20-second TikTok clip.

It's just so refreshing to see you going exactly against all of the advice and doing these really long form things and the people appreciate it.

So let me ask you again the first question I've ever asked on this podcast.

Episode Number 1, talking to you, do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?

What's your view when you look out to the stars?

So when we look out to the stars, If you define our universe the way most astrophysicists do, not as all of space, but the spherical region of space that we can see with our telescopes from which light has a time to reach us, since our Big Bang, I'm in the minority.

I estimate that we are the only life in this spherical volume that has invented internet, radio, has gotten our level of tech.

And if that's true, then it puts a lot of responsibility on us to not mess this 1 up.

Because if it's true, it means that life is quite rare and we are stewards of this 1 spark of advanced consciousness, which if we nurture it and help it grow, eventually life can spread from here out into much of our universe and we can have this just amazing future.

Whereas if we instead are reckless with the technology we build and just snuff it out due to stupidity or infighting, then maybe the rest of cosmic history in our universe is just gonna be a play for empty benches.

But I do think that we are actually very likely to get visited by aliens, alien intelligence quite soon.

But I think we are gonna be building that alien intelligence.

So we're going to give birth to an intelligent alien civilization, unlike anything that human, the evolution here on Earth was able to create in terms of the path, the biological path it took.

Yeah, and it's gonna be much more alien than a cat or even the most exotic animal on the planet right now because it will not have been created through the usual Darwinian competition where it necessarily cares about self-preservation, is afraid of death, any of those things.

The space of alien minds that you can build is just so much vaster than what evolution will give you.

And with that also comes a great responsibility for us to make sure that the kind of minds we create are the kind of minds that it's good to create, minds that will share our values and be good for humanity and life, and also create minds that don't suffer.

Do you try to visualize the full space of alien minds that AI could be?

You try to consider all the different kinds of intelligences sort of generalizing what humans are able to do to the full spectrum of what intelligent creatures, entities could do.

I mean, it's very difficult for a human mind to really grapple with something so completely alien.

If we just try to imagine, how would it feel if we were completely indifferent towards death or individuality?

Even if you just imagine that, for example, you could just copy my knowledge of how to speak Swedish.

And you could copy any of my cool experiences and then you could delete the ones you didn't like in your own life, just like that.

It would already change quite a lot about how you feel as a human being, right?

You probably spend less effort studying things if you just copy them.

And you might be less afraid of death because if the plane you're on starts to crash, you'd just be like, oh, shucks, I haven't backed my brain up for 4 hours.

So I'm gonna lose all these wonderful experiences of this flight.

We might also start feeling more compassionate, maybe with other people, if we can so readily share each other's experiences and our knowledge and feel more like a hive mind.

It's very hard though, I really feel very humble about this to grapple with it, how it might actually feel.

The 1 thing which is so obvious though, which I think is just really worth reflecting on is because the mind space of possible intelligences is so different from ours, it's very dangerous if we assume they're gonna be like us or anything like

Well, there's the entirety of human written history has been through poetry, through novels, been trying to describe through philosophy, trying to describe the human condition and what's entailed in it.

Like Jessica said, fear of death and all those kinds of things, what is love?

And all of that changes if you have a different kind of intelligence.

All of it, the entirety, all those poems, They're trying to sneak up to what the hell it means to be human.

How AI concerns and existential crises that AI experiences, how that clashes with the human existential crisis, the human condition.

It's hard, but it's fascinating to think about also.

Even in the best case scenario where we don't lose control over the ever more powerful AI that we're building to other humans whose goals we think are horrible and where we don't lose control to the machines and AI provides the things we want.

Even then, you get into the questions you touched here.

Maybe it's the struggle that it's actually hard to do things is part of the things that gives us meaning as well.

So for example, I found it so shocking that this new Microsoft GPT-4 commercial that they put together has this woman talking about, showing this demo, how she's gonna give a graduation speech to her beloved daughter, and she asks GPT-4 to write it.

If it's freaking 200 words or so, if I realized that my parents couldn't be bothered struggling a little bit to write 200 words and outsource that to their computer, I would feel really offended, actually.

And so I wonder if eliminating too much of the struggle from our existence, Do you think that would also take away a little bit of what?

I had somebody mention to me that they use, they started using Chad GPT with a 3.5 and not

to write what they really feel to a person, and they have a temper issue, and they're basically trying to get Chad GPT to rewrite it in a nicer way, to get the point across, but rewrite it in a nicer way.

So we're even removing the inner asshole from our communication.

So there's some positive aspects of that, but mostly it's just the transformation of how humans communicate.

And it's scary because so much of our society is based on this glue of communication.

And if we're now using AI as the medium of communication that does the language for us.

So much of the emotion that's laden in human communication, so much of the intent that's going to be handled by outsourced AI, how does that change everything?

How does that change the internal state of how we feel about other human beings?

What makes us lonely, what makes us excited?

What makes us afraid, how we fall in love, all that kind

Yeah, for me personally, I have to confess, the challenge is 1 of the things that really makes my life feel meaningful.

If I go hike a mountain with my wife, Maya, I don't wanna just press a button and be at the top.

I want to struggle and come up there sweaty and feel, wow, we did this.

In the same way, I want to constantly work on myself to become a better person.

If I say something in anger that I regret, I wanna go back and really work on myself rather than just tell an AI from now on always filter what I write so I don't have to work on myself because then I'm not growing.

Yeah, but then again it could be like with chess.

An AI, once it significantly, obviously, supersedes the performance of humans, it will live in its own world and provide maybe a flourishing civilization for humans, but we humans will continue hiking mountains and playing our games, even though AI is so much smarter, so much stronger, so much superior in every single way, just like with chess.

So that's 1 possible hopeful trajectory here, is that humans will continue to human and AI will just be a kind of, a medium that enables the human experience to flourish.

I would phrase that as rebranding ourselves from homo sapiens to homo sentiens.

You know, right now sapiens, the ability to be intelligent, we've even put it in our species name.

So we're branding ourselves as the smartest information processing entity on the planet.

That's clearly gonna change if AI continues ahead.

So maybe we should focus on the experience instead, the subjective experience that we have with homo sentience and say that's what's really valuable, the love, the connection, the other things.

Get off our high horses and get rid of this hubris that only we can do integrals.

So consciousness, this objective experience, is a fundamental value to what it means to be human.

That feels like a hopeful direction to me, but that also requires more compassion, not just towards other humans, because they happen to be the smartest on the planet, but also towards all our other fellow creatures on this planet.

I personally feel right now we're treating a lot of farm animals horribly, for example, and the excuse we're using is, oh, they're not as smart as us.

But if we admit that we're not that smart in the grand scheme of things either, in the post-AI epoch, you know, then surely we should value the subjective experience of a cow also.

allow me to briefly look at the book, which at this point is becoming more and more visionary that you've written, I guess over 5 years ago, Life

So, first of all, 3.0, what's 1.0, what's 2.0, what's 3.0?

And how's that vision sort of evolve, the vision in the book evolve to today?

Life 1.0 is really dumb like bacteria in that it can't actually learn anything at all during the lifetime.

The learning just comes from this genetic process from 1 generation to the next.

Life 2.0 is us and other animals which have brains which can learn during their lifetime a great deal.

And so, and you know, you were born without being able to speak English.

And at some point you decided, hey, I want to upgrade my software.

Let's install an English speaking module.

And Life 3.0, which does not exist yet, can replace not only its software the way we can, but also its hardware.

And That's where we're heading towards at high speed.

We're already maybe 2.1, because we can put in an artificial knee, pacemaker, et cetera, et cetera.

And if Neuralink and other companies succeed, we'll be like 2.2, et cetera.

But what the company's trying to build AGI or trying to make is of course full 3.0 and you can put that intelligence into something that also has no biological basis whatsoever.

So less constraints and more capabilities, just like the leap from 1.0 to 2.0.

There is nevertheless, you speaking so harshly about bacteria, so disrespectfully about bacteria, there is still the same kind of magic there that permeates life 2.0 and 3.0.

It seems like maybe the thing that's truly powerful about life, intelligence, and consciousness was already there in 1.0.

I think we should be humble and not be so quick to make everything binary and say either it's there or it's not, clearly there's a great spectrum.

And there is even controversy about whether some unicellular organisms like amoebas can maybe learn a little bit after all.

So apologies if I offended any bacteria here.

It was more that I wanted to talk up how cool it is to actually have a brain where you can learn dramatically within your lifetime.

And the higher up you get from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0, the more you become the captain of your own ship, the master of your own destiny, and the less you become a slave to whatever evolution gave you, right?

By upgrading our software, we can be so different from previous generations and even from our parents, much more so than even a bacterium, you know, no offense to them.

your hardware and take any physical form you want, of course, really the sky's the limit.

Yeah, so it accelerates the rate at which you

can perform the computation that determines your destiny.

Yeah, and I think it's worth commenting a bit on what you means in this context also, if you swap things out a lot, right?

This is controversial, but my current understanding is that life is best thought of not as a bag of meat or even a bag of elementary particles, but rather as a system which can process information and retain its own complexity, even though nature is always trying to mess it up.

So it's all about information processing.

And that makes it a lot like something like a wave in the ocean, which is not, it's water molecules, right?

The water molecules bob up and down, but the wave moves forward, it's an information pattern.

In the same way, you, Lex, you're not the same atoms as during the first interview you did with me.

You've swapped out most of them, but it's still you.

And the information pattern is still there.

And if you could swap out your arms and like whatever, you can still have this kind of continuity.

It becomes much more sophisticated sort of way forward in time where the information lives on.

I lost both of my parents since our last podcast and it actually gives me a lot of solace that this way of thinking about them, they haven't entirely died because a lot of mommy and daddy's sorry I'm getting a little emotional here but a lot of their values and ideas and even jokes and so on, they haven't gone away.

Some of them live on, I can carry on some of them, and they also live on a lot of other people.

So in this sense, even with Life 2.0, we can, to some extent, already transcend our physical bodies and our death.

And particularly if you can share your own information, your own ideas with many others like you do in your podcast, then that's the closest to immortality we can get with our bio-bodies.

What did you learn about life from them, if we can take a bit of a tangent?

For starters, my fascination for math and the physical mysteries of our universe, I got a lot of that from my dad, but I think my obsession for fairly big questions and consciousness and so on, that actually came mostly from my mom.

And What I got from both of them, which is a very core part of really who I am, I think, is this...

Just feeling comfortable with not buying into what everybody else is saying, doing what I think is right.

They both very much just did their own thing.

And sometimes they got flack for it, and they did it anyway.

That's why you've always been an inspiration to me, that you're at the top of your field and you're still willing to tackle the big questions in your own way.

You're 1 of the people that represents MIT best to me.

You've always been an inspiration in that.

So it's good to hear that you got that from your mom and dad.

But yeah, I mean, the good reason to do science is because you're really curious, you wanna figure out the truth.

If you think this is how it is and everyone else says, no, no, that's bullshit, and it's that way, you stick with what you think is true.

And even if everybody else keeps thinking it's bullshit, there's a certain, I always root for the underdog when I watch movies.

And my dad once, 1 time for example, when I wrote 1 of my craziest papers ever, talking about our universe ultimately being mathematical, which we're not gonna get into today, I got this email from a quite famous professor saying, this is not only bullshit, but it's gonna ruin your career, you should stop doing this kind of stuff.

Segui il tuo corso e lasci dire la gente.

Follow your own path and let the people talk.

This is the kind of thing, he's dead, but that attitude is not.

How did losing them as a man, as a human being change you?

How did it expand your thinking about the world?

How did it expand your thinking about this thing we're talking about, which is humans creating another living, sentient, perhaps, being.

1 of them, just going through all their stuff after they had passed away and so on.

Just drove home to me how important it is to ask ourselves why are we doing the things we do?

Because it's inevitable that you look at some things they spent an enormous time on and you ask, in hindsight, would they really have spent so much time on this?

Would they have done something that was more meaningful?

So I've been looking more in my life now and asking, you know, why am I doing what I'm doing?

And I feel it should either be something I really enjoy doing or it should be something that I find really, really meaningful because it helps humanity.

And if it's in none of those 2 categories, maybe I should spend less time on it.

The other thing is dealing with death up in person like this, it's actually made me less afraid of, even less afraid of other people telling me that I'm an idiot, you know, which happens regularly.

And just, I'm gonna live my life, do my thing, you know.

And it's made it a little bit easier for me to focus on what I feel is really important.

Has it made it more real that this is something that happens?

And I'm next in line in our family now, right?

But they both handled it with such dignity.

They never complained about things, and when you're old and your body starts falling apart, it's more and more to complain about.

They looked at what could they still do that was meaningful, and they focused on that rather than wasting time talking about or even thinking much about things they were disappointed in.

I think anyone can make themselves depressed if they start their morning by making a list of grievances.

Whereas if you start your day with a little meditation and just the things you're grateful for,

you basically choose to be a happy person.

Because you only have a finite number of days

Well, you do happen to be working on a thing which seems to have potentially some of the greatest impact on human civilization of anything humans have ever created, which is artificial intelligence.

This is on the both detailed technical level and in the high philosophical level you work on.

So you've mentioned to me that there's an open letter that you're working on.

I've been having late nights and early mornings.

In short, have you seen Don't Look Up, the film?

I don't wanna be the movie spoiler for anyone watching this who hasn't seen it, but if you're watching this, you haven't seen it, watch it, because we are actually acting out.

Humanity is doing exactly that right now, except it's an asteroid that we are building ourselves.

People are squabbling across the planet about all sorts of things which seem very minor compared to the asteroid that's about to hit us, right?

Most politicians don't even have their radars, this on the radar, they think maybe in 100 years or whatever.

This is the most important fork humanity has reached in its over 100, 000 years on this planet.

We're building effectively a new species that's smarter than us.

It doesn't look so much like a species yet because it's mostly not embodied in robots, but that's a technicality which will soon be changed.

And this arrival of artificial general intelligence that can do all our jobs as well as us, and probably shortly thereafter superintelligence, which greatly exceeds our cognitive abilities, it's gonna either be the best thing ever to happen to humanity or the worst.

I'm really quite confident that there is not that much middle ground there.

But it would be fundamentally transformative

Again, we branded ourselves as homo sapiens because it seemed like the basic thing.

We're the king of the castle on this planet.

If we can control everything else, this could very easily change.

We're certainly not going to be the smartest on the planet for very long if AI, unless AI progress just halts.

And we can talk more about why I think that's true, because it's controversial.

And then we can also talk about reasons you might think it's going to be the best thing ever and the reason you think it's gonna be the end of humanity, which is of course super controversial.

But what I think we can, anyone who's working on advanced AI can agree on is it's much like the film Don't Look Up in that it's just really comical how little serious public debate there is about it given how huge it is.

So what we're talking about is a development of currently things like GPT-4 and the signs it's showing of rapid improvement that may in the near term lead to development of super intelligent AGI, AI, general AI systems, and what kind of impact that has on society.

When that thing achieves general human level intelligence, and then beyond that, general super human level intelligence.

There's a lot of questions to explore here.

It's to suggest that maybe we should pause the development of these systems.

When we talked the first time, we talked about how I was involved in starting the Future Life Institute, and what we worked very hard on 2014, 2015 was the mainstream AI safety.

The idea that there even could be risks and that you could do things about them.

Before then, a lot of people thought it was just really kooky to even talk about it and a lot of AI researchers felt worried that this was too flaky and could be bad for funding and that the people who talked about it were just not, didn't understand AI.

I'm very, very happy with how that's gone and that now, you know, It's completely mainstream.

You go in any AI conference and people talk about AI safety and it's a nerdy technical field full of equations and simul, and blah, blah.

But there's this other thing which has been quite taboo up until now, calling for slowdown.

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Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development | Lex Fridman Podcast #371