Full episode with Ben Goertzel (Jun 2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpSmCKe27WE
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Ben Goertzel is one of the most interesting minds in the artificial intelligence community. He is the founder of SingularityNET, designer of OpenCog AI framework, formerly a director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia Robot. He has been a central figure in the AGI community for many years, including in the Conference on Artificial General Intelligence.

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So if you could live forever, would you live forever?

My goal with longevity research is to abolish the plague of involuntary death.

I don't think people should die unless they choose to die.

If I had to choose forced immortality versus dying, I would choose forced immortality.

On the other hand, if I had the choice of immortality with the choice of suicide whenever I felt like it, of course I would take that instead.

I mean, there's no reason you should have forced immortality.

You should be able to live until you get sick of living.

I mean, that will seem insanely obvious to everyone 50 years from now.

And they will be so, I mean, people who thought death gives meaning to life so we should all die, they will look at that 50 years from now the way we now look at the Anabaptists in the year 1000 who gave away all their positions, went on top of the mountain for Jesus to come and bring them to the ascension.

I mean, it's ridiculous that people think death is good because you gain more wisdom as you approach dying.

I'm 53 and the fact that I might have only a few more decades left, it does make me reflect on things differently.

It does give me a deeper understanding of many things.

You could get a deep understanding in a lot of different ways.

We're going to abolish pain, and that's even more amazing than abolishing death.

I mean, once we get a little better at neuroscience, we'll be able to go in and adjust the brain so that pain doesn't hurt anymore.

And people will say that's bad because there's so much beauty in overcoming pain and suffering.

Oh, sure, and there's beauty in overcoming torture too.

And some people like to cut themselves, but not many, right?

That's an interesting, so, but to push, I mean, to push back, again, this is the Russian side of me, I do romanticize suffering.

It's not obvious, I mean, the way you put it, it seems very logical, it's almost absurd to romanticize suffering or pain or death.

But to me, a world without suffering, without pain, without death, it's non-obvious

No, but what I'm saying is, I guess what I'm trying to say, I don't know if I was presented with that choice what I would choose because to me.

This is a subtler, It's a subtler matter and I've posed it in this conversation in an unnecessarily extreme way.

So I think the way you should think about it is what if there's a little dial on the side of your head and you could turn how much pain hurt.

Turn it down to 0, turn it up to 11, like in spinal tap if it wants.

Maybe through an actual spinal tap, right?

So, I mean, would you opt to have that dial there or not?

The question isn't whether you would turn the pain down to 0 all the time.

My guess is that in some dark moment of your life, you would choose to have the dial implanted and then it would be there.

Just to confess a small thing, don't ask me why, but I'm doing this physical challenge currently where I'm doing 680 pushups and pull-ups a day.

And my shoulder is currently, as we sit here, in a lot of pain.

And I don't know, I would certainly right now, if you gave me a doll, I would turn that sucker to 0 as quickly as possible.

But I don't, I think the whole point of this journey is,

Well, because you're a twisted human being.

twisted, so the question is, am I somehow twisted because I created some kind of narrative for myself so that I can deal with the injustice and the suffering in the world?

Or is this actually going to be a source of happiness?

this is, to an extent, is a research question that humanity will undertake, right?

So I mean, Human beings do have a particular biological makeup which sort of implies a certain probability distribution over motivational systems, right?

Now the question is, how flexibly can that morph as society and technology change, right?

So if we're given that dial, and we're given a society in which, say, we don't have to work for a living, and in which there's an ambient, decentralized, benevolent AI network that will warn us when we're about to hurt ourself.

You know, if we're in a different context, can we consistently, with being genuinely and fully human, can we consistently get into a state of consciousness where we just want to keep the pain dial turned all the way down, and yet we're leading very rewarding and fulfilling lives, right?

Now, I suspect the answer is yes, we can do that, but I don't know that for certain.

Yeah, now, I'm more confident that we could create a non-human AGI system, which just didn't need an analog of feeling pain.

And I think that AGI system will be fundamentally healthier and more benevolent than human beings.

So I think it might or might not be true that humans need a certain element of suffering to be satisfied humans, consistent with the human physiology.

If it is true, that's 1 of the things that makes us fucked and disqualified to be the super AGI, right?

I mean, the nature of the human motivational system is that we seem to gravitate towards situations where the best thing in the large scale is not the best thing in the small scale, according to our subjective value system.

So we gravitate towards subjective value judgments where to gratify ourselves in the large, we have to ungratify ourselves in the small.

And we do that in, You see that in music, there's a theory of music which says the key to musical aesthetics is the surprising fulfillment of expectations.

Like you want something that will fulfill the expectations enlisted in the prior part of the music, but in a way with a bit of a twist that surprises you.

And I mean, that's true not only in out there music like my own or that of Zappa or Steve Vai or Buckethead or Christoph Penderecki or something.

It's not there in elevator music too much, but that's why it's boring, right?

But wrapped up in there is, we want to hurt a little bit so that we can feel the pain go away.

We want to be a little confused by what's coming next.

So then when the thing that comes next actually makes sense, it's so satisfying, right?

That's the surprising fulfillment of expectation, is that what you said?

Is there, we've been skirting around a little bit, but if I were to ask you the most ridiculous big question of what is the meaning of life?

I think you need joy, I mean that's the basis of everything if you want the number 1 value.

On the other hand, I'm unsatisfied with a static joy that doesn't progress, perhaps because of some elemental element of human perversity, but the idea of something that grows and becomes more and more and better and better in some sense appeals to me.

But I also sort of like the idea of individuality, that as a distinct system I have some agency, so there's some nexus of causality within this system, rather than the causality being wholly evenly distributed over the joyous growing mass.

So you start with joy, growth, and choice as 3 basic values.

Those 3 things could continue indefinitely.

Is there some aspect of something you called, which I like, super longevity that you find exciting?

Is there, research-wise, is there ideas in that space that?

I mean, I think, yeah, in terms of the meaning of life, this really ties into that, because for us as humans, probably the way to get the most joy, growth, and choice is transhumanism and to go beyond the human form that we have right now.

I mean, I think the human body is great and by no means do any of us maximize the potential for joy, growth, and choice imminent in our human bodies.

On the other hand, it's clear that other configurations of matter could manifest even greater amounts of joy, growth, and choice than humans do, maybe even finding ways to go beyond the realm of matter as we understand it right now.

So I think in a practical sense, much of the meaning I see in human life is to create something better than humans and go beyond human life.

But certainly that's not all of it for me in a practical sense, right?

Like I have 4 kids and a granddaughter and many friends and parents and family and just enjoying everyday human social existence.

Yeah, yeah, and I mean, I love, I've always, when I could live near nature, I spend a bunch of time out in nature in the forest and on the water every day and so forth, so I mean, enjoying the pleasant moment is part of it, but the growth and choice aspect are severely limited by our human biology.

In particular, dying seems to inhibit your potential for personal growth considerably, as far as we know.

I mean, there's some element of life after death perhaps, but even if there is, why not also continue going in this biological realm, right?

In super longevity, I mean, We haven't yet cured aging, we haven't yet cured death.

Certainly there's very interesting progress all around.

I mean CRISPR and gene editing can be an incredible tool.

And I mean right now stem cells could potentially prolong life a lot.

Like, if you got stem cell injections of just stem cells for every tissue of your body injected into every tissue, and you can just have replacement of your old cells with new cells produced by those stem cells.

I mean, that could be highly impactful at prolonging life.

Now we just need slightly better technology for having them grow, right?

So using machine learning to guide procedures for stem cell differentiation and trans differentiation, it's kind of nitty gritty, but I mean, that's quite interesting.

So I think there's a lot of different things being done to help with prolongation of human life, but we could do a lot better.

So for example, the extracellular matrix, which is the bunch of proteins in between the cells in your body, they get stiffer and stiffer as you get older.

And the extracellular matrix transmits information both electrically, mechanically, and to some extent, biophotonically.

So there's all this transmission through the parts of the body, but the stiffer the extracellular matrix gets, the less the transmission happens, which makes your body get worse coordinated between the different organs as you get older.

So my friend Christian Schaffmeister at my alumnus organization, my alma mater, the great Temple University, Christian Schaffmeister has a potential solution to this where he has these novel molecules called spiral ligamers, which are like polymers that are not organic.

They're specially designed polymers so that you can algorithmically predict exactly how they'll fold very simply.

So he designed molecular scissors that have spiral ligamers that you could eat and would then cut through all the glucosamine and other cross-linked proteins in your extracellular matrix, right?

But to make that technology really work and be mature is several years of work.

As far as I know, no one's funding it at the moment.

So there's so many different ways that technology could be used to prolong longevity.

What we really need, we need an integrated database of all biological knowledge about human beings and model organisms, like hopefully a massively distributed open cog bioatom space, but it can exist in other forms too.

We need that data to be opened up in a suitably privacy-protecting way.

We need massive funding into machine learning, AGI, proto-AGI, statistical research aimed at solving biology, both molecular biology and human biology, based on this massive, massive data set, right?

And then we need regulators not to stop people from trying radical therapies on themselves if they so wish to, as well as better cloud-based platforms for automated experimentation on microorganisms, flies and mice and so forth.

You look, after the last financial crisis, Obama, who I generally like pretty well, but he gave $4 trillion to large banks and insurance companies.

You know, now in this COVID crisis, trillions are being spent to help everyday people and small businesses.

In the end, we'll probably will find many more trillions are being given to large banks and insurance companies.

Anyway, like could the world put $10 trillion into making a massive holistic bio AI and bio simulation and experimental biology infrastructure?

We could, we could put $10 trillion into that without even screwing us up too badly, just as in the end COVID and the last financial crisis won't screw up the world economy so badly.

We're not putting $10 trillion into that.

Instead, all this research is siloed inside a few big companies and government agencies, and most of the data that comes from our individual bodies, personally, that could feed this AI to solve aging and death, most of that data is sitting in some hospital's database doing nothing, right?


Speaker 0: So if you could live forever, would you live forever? Forever.

Speaker 1: My goal with longevity research is to abolish the plague of involuntary death. I don't think people should die unless they choose to die. If I had to choose forced immortality versus dying, I would choose forced immortality. On the other hand, if I had the choice of immortality with the choice of suicide whenever I felt like it, of course I would take that instead. And that's the more realistic choice.

I mean, there's no reason you should have forced immortality. You should be able to live until you get sick of living. I mean, that will seem insanely obvious to everyone 50 years from now. And they will be so, I mean, people who thought death gives meaning to life so we should all die, they will look at that 50 years from now the way we now look at the Anabaptists in the year 1000 who gave away all their positions, went on top of the mountain for Jesus to come and bring them to the ascension. I mean, it's ridiculous that people think death is good because you gain more wisdom as you approach dying.

Of course it's true. I'm 53 and the fact that I might have only a few more decades left, it does make me reflect on things differently. It does give me a deeper understanding of many things. But I mean, so what? You could get a deep understanding in a lot of different ways.

Pain is the same way. We're going to abolish pain, and that's even more amazing than abolishing death. I mean, once we get a little better at neuroscience, we'll be able to go in and adjust the brain so that pain doesn't hurt anymore. And people will say that's bad because there's so much beauty in overcoming pain and suffering. Oh, sure, and there's beauty in overcoming torture too.

And some people like to cut themselves, but not many, right?

Speaker 0: That's an interesting, so, but to push, I mean, to push back, again, this is the Russian side of me, I do romanticize suffering. It's not obvious, I mean, the way you put it, it seems very logical, it's almost absurd to romanticize suffering or pain or death. But to me, a world without suffering, without pain, without death, it's non-obvious

Speaker 1: what that world would say. Well then you can stay in the people zoo

Speaker 0: with the people

Speaker 1: torturing each other.

Speaker 0: No, but what I'm saying is, I guess what I'm trying to say, I don't know if I was presented with that choice what I would choose because to me.

Speaker 1: This is a subtler, It's a subtler matter and I've posed it in this conversation in an unnecessarily extreme way. So I think the way you should think about it is what if there's a little dial on the side of your head and you could turn how much pain hurt. Turn it down to 0, turn it up to 11, like in spinal tap if it wants. Maybe through an actual spinal tap, right? So, I mean, would you opt to have that dial there or not?

That's the question. The question isn't whether you would turn the pain down to 0 all the time. Would you opt to have the dial or not? My guess is that in some dark moment of your life, you would choose to have the dial implanted and then it would be there.

Speaker 0: Just to confess a small thing, don't ask me why, but I'm doing this physical challenge currently where I'm doing 680 pushups and pull-ups a day. And my shoulder is currently, as we sit here, in a lot of pain. And I don't know, I would certainly right now, if you gave me a doll, I would turn that sucker to 0 as quickly as possible. But I don't, I think the whole point of this journey is,

Speaker 1: I don't know. Well, because you're a twisted human being. I'm a

Speaker 0: twisted, so the question is, am I somehow twisted because I created some kind of narrative for myself so that I can deal with the injustice and the suffering in the world? Or is this actually going to be a source of happiness? I mean,

Speaker 1: this is, to an extent, is a research question that humanity will undertake, right? So I mean, Human beings do have a particular biological makeup which sort of implies a certain probability distribution over motivational systems, right? So I mean, we, and that is there.

Speaker 0: Well put.

Speaker 1: That is there. Now the question is, how flexibly can that morph as society and technology change, right? So if we're given that dial, and we're given a society in which, say, we don't have to work for a living, and in which there's an ambient, decentralized, benevolent AI network that will warn us when we're about to hurt ourself. You know, if we're in a different context, can we consistently, with being genuinely and fully human, can we consistently get into a state of consciousness where we just want to keep the pain dial turned all the way down, and yet we're leading very rewarding and fulfilling lives, right? Now, I suspect the answer is yes, we can do that, but I don't know that for certain.

Yeah, now, I'm more confident that we could create a non-human AGI system, which just didn't need an analog of feeling pain. And I think that AGI system will be fundamentally healthier and more benevolent than human beings. So I think it might or might not be true that humans need a certain element of suffering to be satisfied humans, consistent with the human physiology. If it is true, that's 1 of the things that makes us fucked and disqualified to be the super AGI, right? I mean, the nature of the human motivational system is that we seem to gravitate towards situations where the best thing in the large scale is not the best thing in the small scale, according to our subjective value system.

So we gravitate towards subjective value judgments where to gratify ourselves in the large, we have to ungratify ourselves in the small. And we do that in, You see that in music, there's a theory of music which says the key to musical aesthetics is the surprising fulfillment of expectations. Like you want something that will fulfill the expectations enlisted in the prior part of the music, but in a way with a bit of a twist that surprises you. And I mean, that's true not only in out there music like my own or that of Zappa or Steve Vai or Buckethead or Christoph Penderecki or something. It's even there in Mozart or something.

It's not there in elevator music too much, but that's why it's boring, right? But wrapped up in there is, we want to hurt a little bit so that we can feel the pain go away. We want to be a little confused by what's coming next. So then when the thing that comes next actually makes sense, it's so satisfying, right? And so.

Speaker 0: That's the surprising fulfillment of expectation, is that what you said?

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 0: That's so beautifully put. Is there, we've been skirting around a little bit, but if I were to ask you the most ridiculous big question of what is the meaning of life? What would your answer be?

Speaker 1: 3 values, joy, growth, and choice. I think you need joy, I mean that's the basis of everything if you want the number 1 value. On the other hand, I'm unsatisfied with a static joy that doesn't progress, perhaps because of some elemental element of human perversity, but the idea of something that grows and becomes more and more and better and better in some sense appeals to me. But I also sort of like the idea of individuality, that as a distinct system I have some agency, so there's some nexus of causality within this system, rather than the causality being wholly evenly distributed over the joyous growing mass. So you start with joy, growth, and choice as 3 basic values.

That's

Speaker 0: something. Those 3 things could continue indefinitely. That's something that can last forever. Is there some aspect of something you called, which I like, super longevity that you find exciting? Is there, research-wise, is there ideas in that space that?

Speaker 1: I mean, I think, yeah, in terms of the meaning of life, this really ties into that, because for us as humans, probably the way to get the most joy, growth, and choice is transhumanism and to go beyond the human form that we have right now. I mean, I think the human body is great and by no means do any of us maximize the potential for joy, growth, and choice imminent in our human bodies. On the other hand, it's clear that other configurations of matter could manifest even greater amounts of joy, growth, and choice than humans do, maybe even finding ways to go beyond the realm of matter as we understand it right now. So I think in a practical sense, much of the meaning I see in human life is to create something better than humans and go beyond human life. But certainly that's not all of it for me in a practical sense, right?

Like I have 4 kids and a granddaughter and many friends and parents and family and just enjoying everyday human social existence. But we can do even better. Yeah, yeah, and I mean, I love, I've always, when I could live near nature, I spend a bunch of time out in nature in the forest and on the water every day and so forth, so I mean, enjoying the pleasant moment is part of it, but the growth and choice aspect are severely limited by our human biology. In particular, dying seems to inhibit your potential for personal growth considerably, as far as we know. I mean, there's some element of life after death perhaps, but even if there is, why not also continue going in this biological realm, right?

In super longevity, I mean, We haven't yet cured aging, we haven't yet cured death. Certainly there's very interesting progress all around. I mean CRISPR and gene editing can be an incredible tool. And I mean right now stem cells could potentially prolong life a lot. Like, if you got stem cell injections of just stem cells for every tissue of your body injected into every tissue, and you can just have replacement of your old cells with new cells produced by those stem cells.

I mean, that could be highly impactful at prolonging life. Now we just need slightly better technology for having them grow, right? So using machine learning to guide procedures for stem cell differentiation and trans differentiation, it's kind of nitty gritty, but I mean, that's quite interesting. So I think there's a lot of different things being done to help with prolongation of human life, but we could do a lot better. So for example, the extracellular matrix, which is the bunch of proteins in between the cells in your body, they get stiffer and stiffer as you get older.

And the extracellular matrix transmits information both electrically, mechanically, and to some extent, biophotonically. So there's all this transmission through the parts of the body, but the stiffer the extracellular matrix gets, the less the transmission happens, which makes your body get worse coordinated between the different organs as you get older. So my friend Christian Schaffmeister at my alumnus organization, my alma mater, the great Temple University, Christian Schaffmeister has a potential solution to this where he has these novel molecules called spiral ligamers, which are like polymers that are not organic. They're specially designed polymers so that you can algorithmically predict exactly how they'll fold very simply. So he designed molecular scissors that have spiral ligamers that you could eat and would then cut through all the glucosamine and other cross-linked proteins in your extracellular matrix, right?

But to make that technology really work and be mature is several years of work. As far as I know, no one's funding it at the moment. So there's so many different ways that technology could be used to prolong longevity. What we really need, we need an integrated database of all biological knowledge about human beings and model organisms, like hopefully a massively distributed open cog bioatom space, but it can exist in other forms too. We need that data to be opened up in a suitably privacy-protecting way.

We need massive funding into machine learning, AGI, proto-AGI, statistical research aimed at solving biology, both molecular biology and human biology, based on this massive, massive data set, right? And then we need regulators not to stop people from trying radical therapies on themselves if they so wish to, as well as better cloud-based platforms for automated experimentation on microorganisms, flies and mice and so forth. We could do all this. You look, after the last financial crisis, Obama, who I generally like pretty well, but he gave $4 trillion to large banks and insurance companies. You know, now in this COVID crisis, trillions are being spent to help everyday people and small businesses.

In the end, we'll probably will find many more trillions are being given to large banks and insurance companies. Anyway, like could the world put $10 trillion into making a massive holistic bio AI and bio simulation and experimental biology infrastructure? We could, we could put $10 trillion into that without even screwing us up too badly, just as in the end COVID and the last financial crisis won't screw up the world economy so badly. We're not putting $10 trillion into that. Instead, all this research is siloed inside a few big companies and government agencies, and most of the data that comes from our individual bodies, personally, that could feed this AI to solve aging and death, most of that data is sitting in some hospital's database doing nothing, right?

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If You Could Live Forever Would You? (Ben Goertzel) | AI Podcast Clips with Lex Fridman