Charles Isbell is the Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
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Charles's Website: https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~isbell/

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:36 - Top 3 movies of all time
8:45 - People are easily predictable
14:27 - Breaking out of our bubbles
26:13 - Interactive AI
32:45 - Lifelong machine learning
41:12 - Faculty hiring
48:47 - University rankings
56:15 - Science communicators
1:05:39 - Hip hop
1:14:39 - Funk
1:16:03 - Computing
1:31:55 - Race
1:47:59 - Cop story
1:56:20 - Racial tensions
2:05:42 - MLK vs Malcolm X
2:09:03 - Will human civilization destroy itself? 
2:13:34 - Fear of death and the passing of time

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a conversation with Charles Isbell, Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, a researcher and educator in the field of artificial intelligence, and someone who deeply thinks about what exactly is the field of computing and how do we teach it.

He also has a fascinatingly varied set of interests, including music, books, movies, sports, and history.

They make him especially fun to talk with.

When I first saw him speak, his charisma immediately took over the room.

And I had a stupid excited smile on my face.

And I knew I had to eventually talk to him on this podcast.

Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode.

First is Neuro, the maker of functional sugar-free gum and mints that I use to give my brain a quick caffeine boost.

Second is Decoding Digital, a podcast on tech and entrepreneurship that I listen to and enjoy.

Third is Masterclass, online courses that I watch from some of the most amazing humans in history.

And finally, Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends for food and drinks.

Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that I'm trying to make it so that the conversations with Charles, Eric Weinstein, and Dan Carlin will be published before Americans vote for president on November 3rd.

There's nothing explicitly political in these conversations, but they do touch on something in human nature that I hope can bring context to our difficult time, and maybe for a moment, allow us to empathize with people we disagree with.

With Eric, we talk about the nature of evil.

With Charles, besides AI and music, we talk a bit about race in America and how we can bring more love and empathy to our online communication.

And with Dan Carlin, well, we talk about Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, and all the complicated parts of human history in between, with a hopeful eye toward a brighter future for our humble little civilization here on Earth.

The conversation with Dan will hopefully be posted tomorrow on Monday, November 2nd.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman.

And now, here's my conversation with Charles Isbell.

You've mentioned that you love movies and TV shows.

Let's ask an easy question, but you have to be definitively, objectively conclusive.

So you're asking me to be definitive and to be conclusive.

That's a little hard, I'm gonna tell you why.

It's because movies is too broad of a category.

But I will tell you that of those genres, I'll pick 1 or 2 from each of the genres.

I'll get us to 3, so I'm not gonna cheat.

So my favorite comedy of all times, which probably my favorite movie of all time, is His Girl Friday, which is probably a movie that you've not ever heard of, but it's based on a play called The Front Page from, I don't know, early 1900s.

This is 1 of the movies that would have been very popular, it's a screwball comedy.

So you've seen these shows where there's a man and a woman and they clearly are in love with 1 another and they're constantly fighting and always talking over each other.

This was the movie that started all that as far as I'm concerned.

So it's I don't know it must have come out sometime between 1934 and 1939.

I'm not sure exactly when the movie itself came out It's black and white.

It's it's just a fantastic film is hilarious.

It's mostly conversation Oh, not entirely but mostly mostly Just a lot of back and forth.

There's a story there, someone's on death row, and they're newspaper men, including her.

They were divorced, the editor, the publisher I guess, and the reporter, they were divorced, but they clearly, he's thinking, trying to get back together, and there's this whole other thing that's going on, but none of that matters, the plot doesn't matter.

It's fantastic, And I just love everything about the conversation.

Because at the end of the day, sort of narrative and conversation are the sort of things that drive me.

And so I really like that movie for that reason.

Similarly, I'm now gonna cheat and I'm gonna give you 2 movies as 1.

And they're Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and John Wick.

Both relatively modern, John Wick of course is.

It gets increasingly, I love them all for different reasons, and increasingly more ridiculous.

Kind of like loving Alien and Aliens, despite the fact they're 2 completely different movies.

But the reason I put Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and John Wick together is because I actually think they're the same movie, or what I like about them, the same movie, which is both of them create a world that you're coming in the middle of, and they don't explain it to you.

But the story is done so well that you pick it up.

So anyone who's seen John Wick, you know, you have these little coins and they're headed out and there are these rules and apparently every single person in New York City is an assassin.

There's like 2 people who come through who aren't, but otherwise they are.

But there's this complicated world and everyone knows each other.

They don't sit down and explain it to you, but you figure it out.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon's a lot like that.

You get the feeling that this is chapter 9 of a 10-part story and you've missed the first 8 chapters and they're not gonna explain it to you, but there's this sort of rich world behind you.

You get pulled in anyway, like immediately.

So it's just excellent storytelling in both cases and very, very different.

But Sorry to pause on that, martial arts?

You have a long list of hobbies, like it scrolls off the page, but I didn't see martial arts as 1 of them.

I do not do martial arts, but I certainly

Oh, we could talk about every Jackie Chan movie ever made, and I would be on board with that.

Like The Couch Hour 2, like that kind of, the comedy of it, cop.

By the way, my favorite Jackie Chan movie would be Drunken Master 2.

Known in the States usually as Legend of the Drunken Master.

Actually, Drunken Master, the first 1, is the first kung fu movie I ever saw, but I did not know that.

No, first 1 ever that I saw and remember.

But I had no idea that that's what it was.

I only later rediscovered that that was actually.

And he creates his own martial art by, was he actually drinking or was he play drinking?

And in the end, he drinks industrial grade alcohol.

Yeah, and has 1 of the most fantastic fights ever in that subgenre.

Anyway, that's my favorite 1 of his movies.

But I'll tell you the last movie is actually a movie called Nothing But a Man, which is a 1960s, starred Ivan Dixon, who you'll know from Hogan's Heroes, and Abbie Lincoln.

But my favorite scenes, I'm cheating, my favorite, 1 of my favorite movies just for the ending is The Godfather.

I think the last scene of that is just fantastic.

It's the whole movie all summarized in just 8, 9 seconds.

I don't think you need to worry about spoilers if you haven't seen The Godfather.

Spoiler alert, it ends with the wife coming to Michael and he says, just this once I'll let you ask me my business.

And she asks him if he did this terrible thing.

And he looks her in the eye and he lies and he says, no.

And she walks out the door and you see her going out of the door, and all these people are coming in, and they're kissing Michael's hands, and Godfather.

And then the camera switches perspective, so instead of looking at him, you're looking at her, and the door closes in her face, and that's the end of the movie.

Do you see parallels between that and your position as dean at Georgia Tech, Colonel?

Sometimes, certainly if the door gets closed on me every once in a while.

You've also mentioned that you, I think, enjoy all kinds of experiments, including on yourself.

But I saw a video where you said you did an experiment where you tracked all kinds of information about yourself and a few others, sort of wiring up your home.

And this little idea that you mentioned in that video, which is kind of interesting, that you thought that 2 days worth of data is enough to capture majority of the behavior of the human being.

First, can you describe what the heck you did to collect all the data, because it's fascinating, just like little details of how you collect that data, and also what your intuition behind the 2 days is.

So, first off, it has to be the right 2 days.

But I was thinking of a very specific experiment.

There's actually a suite of them that I've been a part of, and other people have done this, of course.

I just sort of dabbled in that part of the world.

But to be very clear, the specific thing that I was talking about had to do with recording all the IR going on in my, infrared going on in my house.

So this is everything's being controlled by pressing buttons on remote controls as opposed to speaking to Alexa or Siri or someone like that.

And I was just trying to figure out if you could get enough data on people to figure out what they were gonna do with their TVs or their lights.

My house was completely wired up at the time.

Which you know, what, I'm about to look at a movie, or I'm about to turn on the TV or whatever and just see what I could predict from it.

It was kind of surprising, it shouldn't have been.

But that's all very easy to do, by the way, just capturing all the little stuff.

I mean, it's a bunch of computer systems.

It's really easy to capture, if you know what you're looking for.

At Georgia Tech, long before I got there, we had this thing called the Aware Home, where everything was wired up, and you saw, you captured everything that was going on.

Nothing even difficult, not with video or anything like that, just the way that the system was just capturing everything.

So it turns out that, and I did this with myself and then I had students and they worked with many other people, and it turns out at the end of the day, people do the same things over and over and over again.

So it has to be the right 2 days, like a weekend.

But it turns out not only can you predict what someone's going to do next, at the level of what button they're gonna press next on a remote control, but you can do it with something really, really simple.

Like you don't even need a hidden Markov model, it's like a Mark, just simply, I press this, this is my prediction of the next thing, and it turns out you get

accuracy just by doing something very simple and stupid and just counting statistics.

But what was actually more interesting is that you could use that information.

This comes up again and again in my work.

If you try to represent people or objects by the things they do, the things you can measure about them that have to do with action in the world, so a distribution over actions, and you try to represent them by the distribution of actions that are done on them, then you do a pretty good job of sort of understanding how people are and they cluster remarkably well.

And so by clustering people this way, you can, maybe, you know, I got the 93% accuracy of what's the next button you're gonna press, but I can get 99% accuracy, or somewhere there's about, on the collections of things you might press.

And it turns out the things that you might press are all related to number, to each other, in exactly the way that you would expect.

So for example, all the numbers on a keypad, it turns out, all have the same behavior with respect to you as a human being.

And so you would naturally cluster them together and you discover that numbers are all related to 1 another in some way and all these other things.

And then, and here's the part that I think's important.

I mean, you can see this in all kinds of things.

Every individual is different, but any given individual is remarkably predictable, because you keep doing the same things over and over again.

And the 2 things that I've learned in the long time that I've been thinking about this is people are easily predictable and people hate when you tell them that they're easily predictable.

What about, let me play devil's advocate and philosophically speaking, is it possible to say that what defines humans is the outlier?

So even though some large percentage of our behaviors, whatever the signal we measure is the same, and it would cluster nicely, but maybe it's the special moments of when we break out of the routine is the definitive things, and the way we break out of that routine for each 1 of us might be different?

I would say it a little differently, I think.

1 is, I'm gonna disagree with the premise, I think, but that's fine.

I think the way I would put it is, there are people who are very different from lots of other people, but they're not 0%, they're closer to 10%, right?

So in fact, even if you do this kind of clustering of people that'll turn out to be this small number of people.

They all behave like each other, even if they individually behave very differently from everyone else.

But what you're really asking, I think, and I think this is really a question is, you know, what do you do when you're faced with the situation you've never seen before?

What do you do when you're faced with an extraordinary situation maybe you've seen others do and you're actually forced to do something and you react to that very differently and that is the thing that makes you human.

I would agree with that, at least at a philosophical level, that it's the times when you are faced with something difficult, a decision that you have to make, where the answer isn't easy, even if you know what the right answer is, that's sort of what defines you as the individual, and I think what defines people broadly.

It's the hard problem, it's not the easy problem, it's the thing that's gonna hurt you, it's not the thing.

It's not even that it's difficult, it's just that you know that the outcome is going to be highly suboptimal for you.

And I do think that that's a reasonable place to start for the question of what makes us human.

So before we talk about, sort of explore the different ideas underlying interactive artificial intelligence, which we are working on.

to skip to kind of our world of social media, which is something that, at least on the artificial intelligence side, you think about there's a popular narrative.

I don't know if it's true, but that we have these silos in social media and we have these clusterings as you're kind of mentioning.

And the idea is that, along that narrative is that we wanna break each other out of those silos so we can be empathetic to other people.

If you're a Democrat, you're empathetic to the Republican.

If you're a Republican, you're empathetic to a Democrat.

Those are just 2 silly bins that we seem to be very excited about, but there's other binnings that we can think about.

Is there, from an artificial intelligence perspective, because you're just saying we cluster along the data, but then interactive artificial intelligence is referring to throwing agents into that mix, AI systems in that mix, helping us, interacting with us humans and maybe getting us out of those silos.

Is that something that you think is possible?

Do you see a hopeful possibility for artificial intelligence systems in these large networks of people to get us outside of our habits in at least the idea space to where we can sort of be empathetic to other people's lived experiences, other people's points of view, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Yes, and I actually don't think it's that hard.

So imagine that you can, now let's make life simple for a minute.

Let's assume that you can do a kind of partial ordering over ideas or clusterings of behavior.

So long as there's some way that this is a cluster, this is a cluster, there's some edge between them, right?

And this is kind of, they don't quite touch even, or maybe they come very close.

If you can imagine that conceptually, then the way you get from here to here is not by going from here to here, the way you get from here to here is you find the edge and you move slowly together, right?

And I think that machines are actually very good at that sort of thing, once we can kind of define the problem either in terms of behavior or ideas or words or whatever.

So it's easy in the sense that if you already have the network and you know the relationships, you know the edges and sort of the strings on them and you kind of have some semantic meaning for them, the machine doesn't have to, You do as the designer.

Then yeah, I think you can kind of move people along and sort of expand them.

And the reason it's harder than that, or sort of coming up with the network structure itself is hard, is because I'm going to tell you a story that someone else told me.

And I don't, I may get some of the details a little bit wrong, but it's roughly, it roughly goes like this.

You take 2 sets of people from the same backgrounds, and you want them to solve a problem.

So you separate them up, which we do all the time, right, oh, you know, we're gonna break out in the, we're gonna break out groups, you're gonna go over there and you're gonna talk about this, you're gonna go over there and you're gonna talk about this.

And then you have them sort of in this big room, but far apart from 1 another, and you have them sort of interact with 1 another.

When they come back to talk about what they learned, you wanna merge what they've done together, it can be extremely hard because they don't, they basically don't speak the same language anymore.

Like when you create these problems and you dive into them, you create your own language.

So the example this 1 person gave me, which I found kind of interesting because we were in the middle of that at the time, was they're sitting over there and they're talking about these rooms that you can see, but you're seeing them from different vantage points, depending upon which side of the room you're on.

They can see a clock very easily, and so they start referring to the room as the 1 with the clock.

This group over here, looking at the same room, they can see the clock, but it's not in their line of sight or whatever, so they end up referring to it by some other way.

When they get back together and they're talking about things, they're referring to the same room and they don't even realize they're referring to the same room.

In fact, this group doesn't even see that there's a clock there and this group doesn't see whatever it is.

The clock on the wall is the thing that stuck with me.

So if you create these different silos, the problem isn't that the ideologies disagree.

It's that you're using the same words and they mean radically different things.

The hard part is just getting them to agree on the, well, maybe we'd say the axioms in our world, but just get them to agree on some basic definitions.

Because right now, they're talking past each other, just completely talking past each other.

That's the hard part, getting them to meet, getting them to interact, that may not be that difficult.

Getting them to see where their language is leading them to lead past 1 another, that's the hard part.

It's a really interesting question to me.

It could be on the layer of language, but it feels like there's multiple layers to this.

Like it could be worldview, it could be, I mean, it all boils down to empathy, being able to put yourself in the shoes of the other person,

learn the language, to learn visually how they see the world, to learn the, I mean, I experience this now with trolls, the degree of humor in that world.

I'm very lucky to have this amazing community of loving people, but whenever I encounter trolls, they always roll their eyes at the idea of love because it's so quote unquote cringe.

So they show love by derision, I would say.

And I think about, on the human level, that's a whole nother discussion, that's psychology, that's sociology, so on.

But I wonder if AI systems can help somehow and bridge the gap of what is this person's life like?

Encourage me to just ask that question, to put myself in their shoes, to experience the agitations, the fears, the hopes they have, to experience, even just to think about what was their upbringing like, like having a single parent home or a shitty education or all those kinds of things, just to put myself in that mind space.

It feels like that's really important for us to bring those clusters together, to find that similar language, but it's unclear how AI can help that because it seems like AI systems need to understand both parties first.

So, the word understand there's doing a lot of work, right?

So, do you have to understand it or do you just simply have to note that there is something similar as a point to touch, right?

So, you know, you use the word empathy, and I like that word for a lot of reasons.

I think you're right in the way that you're using and the way that you're describing it, but let's separate it from sympathy, right?

So, you know, Sympathy is feeling sort of for someone.

Empathy is kind of understanding where they're coming from and how they feel, right?

And for most people, those things go hand in hand.

For some people, some are very good at empathy and very bad at sympathy.

Some people cannot experience, well, my observation would be, I'm not a psychologist, my observation would be that some people seem incapable of feeling sympathy unless they feel empathy first.

You can understand someone, understand where they're coming from and still think, no, I can't support that.

It doesn't mean that the only way, Because if that isn't the case, then what it requires is that you must, the only way that you can, to understand someone means you must agree with everything that they do.

And if the only way I can feel for someone is to completely understand them and make them like me in some way, well then we're lost, right?

Because we're not all exactly like each other.

I don't have to understand everything that you've gone through.

Even though they get clearly tangled up in 1 another.

So what I think AI could help you do, actually, is if, and I'm being quite fanciful, as it were, but if you think of these as kind of, I understand how you interact, the words that you use, the actions you take, I have some way of doing this, let's not worry about what that is, but I can see you as a kind of distribution of experiences and actions taken upon you, things you've done and so on.

And I can do this with someone else, and I can find the places where there's some kind of commonality, a mapping as it were, even if it's not total.

If I think of it as distribution, right, then I can take the cosine of the angle between you and if it's 0, you've got nothing in common.

If it's 1, you're completely the same person.

I can find the place where there's the overlap, then I might be able to introduce you on that basis or connect you in that way and make it easier for you to take that step of empathy.

It's not impossible to do, although I wonder if it requires that everyone involved is at least interested in asking the question.

So maybe the hard part is just getting them interested in asking the question.

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Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America | Lex Fridman Podcast #135