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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
3:04 - Collective intelligence
9:46 - The origin of intelligence in the human brain
22:59 - How intelligent life evolved on Earth
33:58 - Why humans are special in the universe
37:16 - Neurons
41:30 - A Thousand Brains theory of intelligence
50:10 - How to build superintelligent AI
1:08:10 - Sam Harris and existential risk of AI
1:20:12 - Neuralink
1:27:02 - Will AI prevent the self-destruction of human civilization?
1:32:34 - Communicating human knowledge to alien civilizations
1:42:50 - Devil's advocate
1:47:45 - Human nature
1:56:07 - Hardware for AI
2:02:46 - Advice for young people

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The following is a conversation with Jeff Hawkins, a neuroscientist seeking to understand the structure, function, and origin of intelligence in the human brain.

He previously wrote a seminal book on the subject titled On Intelligence, and recently a new book called A Thousand Brains, which presents a new theory of intelligence that Richard Dawkins, for example, has been raving about, calling the book, quote, brilliant and exhilarating.

I can't read those 2 words and not think of him saying it in his British accent.

Quick mention of our sponsors Codecademy, Bio-Optimizers, ExpressVPN, Asleep, and Blinkist.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that 1 small but powerful idea that Jeff Hawkins mentions in his new book is that if human civilization were to destroy itself, all of knowledge, all our creations will go with us.

He proposes that we should think about how to save that knowledge in a way that long outlives us, whether that's on earth, in orbit around earth, or in deep space, and then to send messages that advertise this backup of human knowledge to other intelligent alien civilizations.

The main message of this advertisement is not that we are here, but that we were once here.

This little difference somehow was deeply humbling to me, that we may, with some non-zero likelihood, destroy ourselves, and that an alien civilization, thousands or millions of years from now, may come across this knowledge store, and they would only with some low probability even notice it, not to mention be able to interpret it.

And the deeper question here for me is what information in all of human knowledge is even essential?

This thought experiment forces me to wonder what are the things we've accomplished and are hoping to still accomplish that will outlive us.

Is it things like complex buildings, bridges, cars, rockets?

Is it ideas like science, physics, and mathematics?

Is it computers, computational systems, or even artificial intelligence systems.

I personally can't imagine that aliens wouldn't already have all of these things.

To me, the only unique thing we may have is consciousness itself, and the actual subjective experience of suffering, of happiness, of hatred, of love.

If we can record these experiences in the highest resolution directly from the human brain, such that aliens will be able to replay them, that is what we should store and send as a message.

Not Wikipedia, but the extremes of conscious experiences.

The most important of which, of course, is love.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, And here is my conversation with Jeff Hawkins.

Do you think there's still neurons in your brain that remember that conversation, that remember me and got excited?

Like there's a Lex neuron in your brain that just like finally has a purpose?

I do remember our conversation, or I have some memories of it.

And I formed additional memories of you in the meantime.

I wouldn't say there's a neuron or a neurons in my brain that know you, but there are synapses in my brain that have formed, that reflect my knowledge of you and the model I have of you and the world.

And whether they're the exact same synapses were formed 2 years ago, it's hard to say because these things come and go all the time.

But we know from, 1 of the things we know about brains is that when you think of things, you often erase the memory and rewrite it again.

So yes, but I have a memory of you and that's instantiated in synapses.

We have a model of the world in your head and that model is continually being updated.

I updated this morning, you offered me this water, you said it was from the refrigerator.

And so the model includes where we live, the places we know, the words, the objects in the world.

It's just a monstrous model and it's constantly being updated and people are just part of that model.

So are animals, so are other physical objects, so are events we've done.

So it's no special, in my mind, special place for the memories of humans.

I mean, obviously I know a lot about my wife but, and friends and so on, but it's not like a special place for humans or over here, but we model everything and we model other people's behaviors too.

So If I said there's a copy of your mind in my mind, it's just because I know how humans, I've learned how humans behave, and I've learned some things about you, and that's part of my world model.

Well, I just also mean the collective intelligence of the human species.

I wonder if there's something fundamental to the brain that enables that.

So modeling other humans with their ideas.

You're actually jumping into a lot of big topics.

Collective intelligence is a separate topic that

Like, you know, we're not just individuals.

But from our research point of view, and so again, let's just talk, We studied the neocortex, it's a sheet of neural tissue, it's about 75% of your brain.

It runs on this very repetitive algorithm.

And so you can apply that algorithm to lots of different problems, but it's all underneath, it's the same thing.

So from our point of view, we wouldn't look for these special circuits someplace buried in your brain that might be related to understanding other humans.

It's more like, how do we build a model of anything?

How do we understand anything in the world?

And humans are just another part of the things we understand.

So there's nothing to the brain that knows the emergent phenomenon of collective intelligence.

Well, I think we have language, which is sort of built into our brains, and that's a key part of collective intelligence.

So there are some prior assumptions about the world we're gonna live in when we're born.

And so did we evolve to take advantage of those situations?

But again, we study only part of the brain, the neocortex.

There's other parts of the brain are very much involved in societal interactions and human emotions and how we interact and even societal issues about how we interact with other people, when we support them, when we're greedy, and things like that.

I mean, certainly the brain is a great place where to study intelligence.

I wonder if it's the fundamental atom of intelligence.

I would say it's absolutely an essential component.

Even if you believe in collective intelligence as, hey, that's where it's all happening, that's what we need to study.

I think it's really important, but I don't think that is the thing.

But even if you do believe that, then you have to understand how the brain works in doing that.

It's more like we are intelligent individuals, and together we are much more magnified our intelligence.

We can do things which we couldn't do individually.

But even as individuals, we're pretty damn smart and we can model things and understand the world and interact with it.

So to me, if you're going to start someplace, you need to start with the brain.

Then you could say, well, how do brains interact with each other?

And how do we share models that I've learned something about the world, how do I share it with you?

Which is really what communal intelligence is.

I know something, you know something, We've had different experiences in the world.

I've learned something about brains, maybe I can impart that to you.

You've learned something about physics and you can impart that to me.

But it all comes down to, even just the epistemological question of, well, what is knowledge And how do you represent it in the brain, right?

And it's not, that's where it's gonna reside, right?

It's obvious that human collaboration, human interaction is how we build societies, right?

But some of the things you talk about and work on, some of those elements of what makes up an intelligent entity is there with a single person.

Absolutely, I mean, we can't deny that the brain is the core element here in, at least I think it's obvious, the brain is the core element in all theories of intelligence.

It's where knowledge is represented, it's where knowledge is created.

We interact, we share, we build upon each other's work, but Without a brain, you'd have nothing.

There would be no intelligence without brains.

I got into this field because I just was curious as to who I am.

What's going on in my head when I'm thinking?

I can ask what it means for me to know something independent of how I learned it from you or from someone else or from society.

What does it mean for me to know that I have a model of you in my head?

I can ask what it means for me to know something independent of how I learned it from you

What does it mean to know I know what this microphone does and how it works physically, even though I can't see it right now?

How do the neurons do that at the fundamental level of neurons and synapses and so on?

Those are really fascinating questions and I'm happy to, just happy to understand those if I could.

So in your new book, you talk about our brain, our mind as being made up of many brains.

So the book is called A Thousand Brain Theory of intelligence.

The book has 3 sections and it has sort of maybe 3 big ideas.

The first section is all about AI, and the third section is about the future of humanity.

So the thousand brains theory, the big idea there, if I had to summarize into 1 big idea, is that we think of the brain, the neocortex, as learning this model of the world.

But what we learned is actually there's tens of thousands of independent modeling systems going on.

And so each, what we call a column in the cortex, there's about 150,000 of them, is a complete modeling system.

So it's a collective intelligence in your head in some sense.

So, the thousand brains theory says, well, where do I have knowledge about this coffee cup or where's the model of this cell phone?

It's in thousands of separate models that are complementary and they communicate with each other through voting.

So this idea that we have, we feel like we're 1 person, that's our experience, we can explain that, but reality, there's lots of these, it's almost like little brains, but they're sophisticated modeling systems, about 150,000 of them in each human brain.

And that's a totally different way of thinking about how the neurocortex is structured than we or anyone else thought of even just 5 years ago.

So you mentioned you started this journey just looking in the mirror and trying to understand who you are.

So it's interesting, we have a singular perception, right?

You know, we think, oh, I'm just here, I'm looking at you.

Like there's sounds and There's vision and there's touch and all kinds of inputs.

And what the thousand brain series says, we have these models that are visual models, we have models that are auditory models, models that talk to models and so on, but they vote.

And so they send in the cortex, you can think about these columns as like little grains of rice,

And each 1 is its own little modeling system.

But they have these long range connections that go between them.

And we call those voting connections or voting neurons.

And so the different columns try to reach a consensus.

Okay, each 1 has some ambiguity, but they come to a consensus.

Oh, there's a water bottle I'm looking at.

We are only consciously able to perceive the voting.

We're not able to perceive anything that goes under the hood.

We were just talking about eye movements a moment ago.

So as I'm looking at something, my eyes are moving, about 3 times a second.

And with each movement, a completely new input is coming into the brain.

It's not repetitive, it's not shifting it around, it's completely new.

But yet, if I looked at the neurons in your brain, they're going on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off.

The voting neurons are saying, you know what, we all agree, even though I'm looking at different parts of this, this is a water bottle right now, and that's not changing, and it's in some position and pose relative to me.

So I have this perception of the water bottle about 2 feet away from me, at a certain pose to me.

I can't be aware of the fact that the inputs from the eyes are moving and changing and all this other stuff.

So these long range connections are the part we can be conscious of.

The individual activity in each column is, doesn't go anywhere else.

It doesn't, there's no way to extract it and talk about it or extract it and even remember it to say, oh, yes, I can recall that.

So, But these long range connections are the things that are accessible to language and to our, it's like the hippocampus, our memories, you know, our short-term memory systems and so on.

So we're not aware of 95%, or maybe it's even 98% of what's going on in your brain.

We're only aware of this sort of stable, somewhat stable voting outcome of all these things that are going on underneath the hood.

So what would you say is the basic element in the thousand brains theory of intelligence of intelligence?

Like what's the atom of intelligence when you think about it?

Well, let's, can we just talk about what intelligence is first?

And then we can talk about what the elements are.

So in my book, intelligence is the ability to learn a model of the world.

To build internal to your head, a model that represents the structure of everything.

To know that this is a table and that's a coffee cup and this is a gooseneck lamp and all this.

To know these things, I have to have a model in my head.

I just don't look at them and go, what is that?

I already have internal representations of these things in my head and I had to learn them.

I wasn't born with any of that knowledge.

That's not part of my evolutionary heritage, right, it's not in my genes.

So we have this incredible model, and the model includes not only what things look like and feel like, but where they are relative to each other and how they behave.

I've never picked up this water bottle before, but I know that if I took my hand on that blue thing and I turn it, it'll probably make a funny little sound as the little plastic things detach, and then it'll rotate and it'll rotate a certain way and it'll come off.

So the essence of intelligence is our ability to learn a model, and the more sophisticated our model is, the smarter we are.

Not that there is a single intelligence, because you know a lot about things that I don't know and I know about things you don't

But we both learned a model of the world through interacting with it.

Then we can ask ourselves, what are the mechanisms in the brain that allow us to do that?

Not just the neural mechanisms, what are the general process for how we learn a model?

It's like, what is the actual things that, how do you learn this stuff?

It turns out you have to learn it through movement.

You can't learn it just by, that's how we learn.

We learn, so you build up this model by observing things and touching them and moving them and walking around the world and so on.

Obviously you can learn things just by reading a book, something like that.

But think about if I were to say, oh, here's a new house, I want you to learn, what do you do?

You have to open the doors, look around, see what's on the left, what's on the right.

As you do this, you're building a model in your head.

You can't just sit there and say, I'm gonna grok the house, no, you know, or you don't even want to just sit there and read some description of it, right?

You literally physically interact with them.

If I'm gonna learn a new app, I touch it and I move things around and I see what happens when I do things with it.

So that's the basic way we learn in the world.

And by the way, when you say model, you mean something that can be used for prediction in the future.

It's used for prediction and for behavior and planning.

You can imagine an architect making a model of a house.

Well, we do that because you can imagine what it would look like from different angles.

You can say, okay, look from here, look from there.

And you can also say, well, how far to get from the garage to the swimming pool or something like that, right?

And you can say, what would be the view from this location?

So we build these physical models to let you imagine the future and imagine behaviors.

Now we can take that same model and put it in a computer.

So we now, today, they'll build models of houses in a computer and they do that using a set of, we'll come back to this term in a moment, reference frames, but basically you assign a reference frame for the house and you assign different things for the house in different locations.

And then the computer can generate an image and say, okay, this is what it looks like in this direction.

The brain is doing something remarkably similar to this.

It's using reference frames, it's building these, it's similar to a model on a computer, which has the same benefits of building a physical model.

It allows me to say, what would this thing look like if it was in this orientation?

What would likely happen if I pushed this button?

I've never pushed this button before, or how would I accomplish something?

I want to convey a new idea I've learned.

I can imagine in my head, well, I could talk about it, I could write a book, I could do some podcasts, I could maybe tell my neighbor, and I can imagine the outcomes of all these things before I do any of them.

Let's just plan the future and imagine the consequences of our actions.

Prediction is an inherent property of it, and it's how the model corrects itself.

So prediction is fundamental to intelligence.

It's fundamental to building a model, and the model's intelligent.

And let me go back and be very precise about this.

Prediction, you can think of prediction 2 ways.

1 is like, hey, what would happen if I did this?

But even prediction is like, oh, what's this water bottle gonna feel like when I pick it up?

But the way to think, 1 way to think about prediction is it's a way for us to learn where our model is wrong.

So if I picked up this water bottle and it felt hot, I'd be very surprised.

Or if I picked it up and it was very light, I'd be surprised.

Or if I turned this top and I had to turn it the other way, I'd be surprised.

And so all those might have a prediction.

What if I had to turn it the other way or what if it it's split in 2 then I say?

I didn't have the right model of this thing.

I'd be looking at it going, well, how the hell did that happen?

Just by looking at it and playing around with it, I'd update it and say, this is a new type of water bottle.

But you, so you're talking about sort of complicated things like a water bottle, but this also applies for just basic vision, just like seeing things.

It's almost like a precondition of just perceiving the world is predicting you.

So just everything that you see is first passed through your prediction of

what you're- Everything you see and feel, in fact, this was the insight I had back in the late 80s, no, excuse me, early 80s, and I know that people have reached the same idea, is that every sensory input you get, not just vision, but touch and hearing, you have an expectation about it and a prediction.

Sometimes you can predict very accurately, sometimes you can't.

I can't predict what next word's going to come out of your mouth, but as you start talking I'll get better and better predictions.

If you talk about some topics, I'd be very surprised.

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Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #208