Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Alex Garland,
00:00:03 writer and director of many imaginative
00:00:06 and philosophical films from the dreamlike exploration
00:00:09 of human self destruction in the movie Annihilation
00:00:12 to the deep questions of consciousness and intelligence
00:00:16 raised in the movie Ex Machina,
00:00:18 which to me is one of the greatest movies
00:00:21 in artificial intelligence ever made.
00:00:23 I’m releasing this podcast to coincide
00:00:25 with the release of this new series called Devs
00:00:28 that will premiere this Thursday, March 5th on Hulu
00:00:32 as part of FX on Hulu.
00:00:35 It explores many of the themes this very podcast is about,
00:00:39 from quantum mechanics to artificial life to simulation
00:00:43 to the modern nature of power in the tech world.
00:00:47 I got a chance to watch a preview and loved it.
00:00:50 The acting is great.
00:00:52 Nick Offerman especially is incredible in it.
00:00:55 The cinematography is beautiful
00:00:58 and the philosophical and scientific ideas
00:00:59 explored are profound.
00:01:02 And for me as an engineer and scientist,
00:01:04 which is fun to see brought to life.
00:01:07 For example, if you watch the trailer
00:01:09 for the series carefully,
00:01:10 you’ll see there’s a programmer with a Russian accent
00:01:13 looking at a screen with Python like code on it
00:01:16 that appears to be using a library
00:01:18 that interfaces with a quantum computer.
00:01:21 This attention and technical detail
00:01:23 on several levels is impressive.
00:01:25 And one of the reasons I’m a big fan
00:01:27 of how Alex weaves science and philosophy together
00:01:30 in his work.
00:01:31 Meeting Alex for me was unlikely,
00:01:35 but it was life changing
00:01:36 in ways I may only be able to articulate in a few years.
00:01:41 Just as meeting spot many of Boston Dynamics
00:01:43 for the first time planted a seed of an idea in my mind,
00:01:47 so did meeting Alex Garland.
00:01:50 He’s humble, curious, intelligent,
00:01:52 and to me an inspiration.
00:01:55 Plus, he’s just really a fun person to talk with
00:01:58 about the biggest possible questions in our universe.
00:02:02 This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
00:02:05 If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,
00:02:07 give it five stars on Apple Podcast,
00:02:09 support it on Patreon,
00:02:10 or simply connect with me on Twitter
00:02:12 at Lex Friedman spelled F R I D M A N.
00:02:17 As usual, I’ll do one or two minutes of ads now
00:02:19 and never any ads in the middle
00:02:21 that can break the flow of the conversation.
00:02:23 I hope that works for you
00:02:24 and doesn’t hurt the listening experience.
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00:02:50 I recommend A Scent of Money
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00:02:55 Debits and credits on ledgers started 30,000 years ago.
00:02:59 The US dollar was created about 200 years ago.
00:03:03 At Bitcoin, the first decentralized cryptocurrency
00:03:07 was released just over 10 years ago.
00:03:10 So given that history,
00:03:11 cryptocurrency is still very much
00:03:13 in its early days of development,
00:03:15 but it still is aiming to
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00:03:33 and STEM education for young people around the world.
00:03:37 And now, here’s my conversation with Alex Garland.
00:03:42 You described the world inside the shimmer
00:03:45 in the movie Annihilation as dreamlike
00:03:47 in that it’s internally consistent
00:03:48 but detached from reality.
00:03:50 That leads me to ask,
00:03:52 do you think, a philosophical question, I apologize,
00:03:56 do you think we might be living in a dream
00:03:58 or in a simulation, like the kind that the shimmer creates?
00:04:03 We human beings here today.
00:04:07 Yeah.
00:04:08 I wanna sort of separate that out into two things.
00:04:11 Yes, I think we’re living in a dream of sorts.
00:04:15 No, I don’t think we’re living in a simulation.
00:04:18 I think we’re living on a planet
00:04:20 with a very thin layer of atmosphere
00:04:23 and the planet is in a very large space
00:04:27 and the space is full of other planets and stars
00:04:30 and quasars and stuff like that.
00:04:31 And I don’t think those physical objects,
00:04:35 I don’t think the matter in that universe is simulated.
00:04:38 I think it’s there.
00:04:40 We are definitely,
00:04:44 it’s a hot problem with saying definitely,
00:04:46 but in my opinion, I’ll just go back to that.
00:04:50 I think it seems very like we’re living in a dream state.
00:04:53 I’m pretty sure we are.
00:04:54 And I think that’s just to do with the nature
00:04:56 of how we experience the world.
00:04:58 We experience it in a subjective way.
00:05:01 And the thing I’ve learned most
00:05:04 as I’ve got older in some respects
00:05:06 is the degree to which reality is counterintuitive
00:05:10 and that the things that are presented to us as objective
00:05:13 turn out not to be objective
00:05:15 and quantum mechanics is full of that kind of thing,
00:05:17 but actually just day to day life
00:05:18 is full of that kind of thing as well.
00:05:20 So my understanding of the way the brain works
00:05:27 is you get some information, hit your optic nerve,
00:05:30 and then your brain makes its best guess
00:05:32 about what it’s seeing or what it’s saying it’s seeing.
00:05:36 It may or may not be an accurate best guess.
00:05:39 It might be an inaccurate best guess.
00:05:41 And that gap, the best guess gap,
00:05:45 means that we are essentially living in a subjective state,
00:05:48 which means that we’re in a dream state.
00:05:51 So I think you could enlarge on the dream state
00:05:54 in all sorts of ways.
00:05:55 So yes, dream state, no simulation
00:05:58 would be where I’d come down.
00:06:00 Going further, deeper into that direction,
00:06:04 you’ve also described that world as psychedelia.
00:06:08 So on that topic, I’m curious about that world.
00:06:11 On the topic of psychedelic drugs,
00:06:13 do you see those kinds of chemicals
00:06:15 that modify our perception
00:06:18 as a distortion of our perception of reality
00:06:22 or a window into another reality?
00:06:25 No, I think what I’d be saying
00:06:27 is that we live in a distorted reality
00:06:29 and then those kinds of drugs
00:06:30 give us a different kind of distorted.
00:06:32 Different perspective.
00:06:33 Yeah, exactly.
00:06:34 They just give an alternate distortion.
00:06:35 And I think that what they really do
00:06:37 is they give a distorted perception,
00:06:41 which is a little bit more allied to daydreams
00:06:45 or unconscious interests.
00:06:47 So if for some reason you’re feeling unconsciously anxious
00:06:51 at that moment and you take a psychedelic drug,
00:06:53 you’ll have a more pronounced, unpleasant experience.
00:06:56 And if you’re feeling very calm or happy,
00:06:59 you might have a good time.
00:07:01 But yeah, so if I’m saying we’re starting from a premise,
00:07:04 our starting point is we were already in the
00:07:07 slightly psychedelic state.
00:07:10 What those drugs do is help you go further down an avenue
00:07:13 or maybe a slightly different avenue, but that’s all.
00:07:16 So in that movie, Annihilation,
00:07:19 the shimmer, this alternate dreamlike state
00:07:24 is created by, I believe perhaps, an alien entity.
00:07:29 Of course, everything is up to interpretation, right?
00:07:32 But do you think there’s, in our world, in our universe,
00:07:36 do you think there’s intelligent life out there?
00:07:39 And if so, how different is it from us humans?
00:07:42 Well, one of the things I was trying to do in Annihilation
00:07:47 was to offer up a form of alien life
00:07:51 that was actually alien,
00:07:53 because it would often seem to me that in the way
00:07:58 that in the way we would represent aliens in books
00:08:03 or cinema or television,
00:08:04 or any one of the sort of storytelling mediums,
00:08:08 is we would always give them very humanlike qualities.
00:08:11 So they wanted to teach us about galactic federations,
00:08:14 or they wanted to eat us, or they wanted our resources,
00:08:17 like our water, or they want to enslave us,
00:08:20 or whatever it happens to be.
00:08:21 But all of these are incredibly humanlike motivations.
00:08:25 And I was interested in the idea of an alien
00:08:30 that was not in any way like us.
00:08:34 It didn’t share.
00:08:36 Maybe it had a completely different clock speed.
00:08:38 Maybe it’s way, so we’re talking about,
00:08:42 we’re looking at each other,
00:08:43 we’re getting information, light hits our optic nerve,
00:08:46 our brain makes the best guess of what we’re doing.
00:08:49 Sometimes it’s right, something, you know,
00:08:50 the thing we were talking about before.
00:08:51 What if this alien doesn’t have an optic nerve?
00:08:54 Maybe its way of encountering the space it’s in
00:08:57 is wholly different.
00:08:59 Maybe it has a different relationship with gravity.
00:09:01 The basic laws of physics it operates under
00:09:04 might be fundamentally different.
00:09:05 It could be a different time scale and so on.
00:09:07 Yeah, or it could be the same laws,
00:09:10 could be the same underlying laws of physics.
00:09:12 You know, it’s a machine created,
00:09:16 or it’s a creature created in a quantum mechanical way.
00:09:19 It just ends up in a very, very different place
00:09:21 to the one we end up in.
00:09:23 So, part of the preoccupation with annihilation
00:09:26 was to come up with an alien that was really alien
00:09:29 and didn’t give us,
00:09:32 and it didn’t give us and we didn’t give it
00:09:35 any kind of easy connection between human and the alien.
00:09:39 Because I think it was to do with the idea
00:09:42 that you could have an alien that landed on this planet
00:09:44 that wouldn’t even know we were here.
00:09:46 And we might only glancingly know it was here.
00:09:49 There’d just be this strange point
00:09:52 where the vent diagrams connected,
00:09:53 where we could sense each other or something like that.
00:09:56 So in the movie, first of all, incredibly original view
00:09:59 of what an alien life would be.
00:10:01 And in that sense, it’s a huge success.
00:10:05 Let’s go inside your imagination.
00:10:07 Did the alien, that alien entity know anything about humans
00:10:13 when it landed?
00:10:13 No.
00:10:14 So the idea is you’re basically an alien
00:10:18 that life is trying to reach out to anything
00:10:22 that might be able to hear its mechanism of communication.
00:10:25 Or was it simply, was it just basically their biologist
00:10:30 exploring different kinds of stuff that you can find?
00:10:32 But this is the interesting thing is,
00:10:34 as soon as you say their biologist,
00:10:36 you’ve done the thing of attributing
00:10:38 human type motivations to it.
00:10:40 So I was trying to free myself from anything like that.
00:10:48 So all sorts of questions you might answer
00:10:51 about this notional alien, I wouldn’t be able to answer
00:10:54 because I don’t know what it was or how it worked.
00:10:57 You know, I had some rough ideas.
00:11:00 Like it had a very, very, very slow clock speed.
00:11:04 And I thought maybe the way it is interacting
00:11:07 with this environment is a little bit like
00:11:09 the way an octopus will change its color forms
00:11:13 around the space that it’s in.
00:11:15 So it’s sort of reacting to what it’s in to an extent,
00:11:19 but the reason it’s reacting in that way is indeterminate.
00:11:23 But it’s so, but it’s clock speed was slower
00:11:26 than our human life clock speed or inter,
00:11:30 but it’s faster than evolution.
00:11:32 Faster than our evolution.
00:11:34 Yeah, given the 4 billion years it took us to get here,
00:11:37 then yes, maybe it started at eight.
00:11:39 If you look at the human civilization as a single organism,
00:11:43 in that sense, you know, this evolution could be us.
00:11:46 You know, the evolution of living organisms on earth
00:11:49 could be just a single organism.
00:11:51 And it’s kind of, that’s its life,
00:11:54 is the evolution process that eventually will lead
00:11:57 to probably the heat death of the universe
00:12:00 or something before that.
00:12:02 I mean, that’s just an incredible idea.
00:12:05 So you almost don’t know.
00:12:07 You’ve created something
00:12:09 that you don’t even know how it works.
00:12:11 Yeah, because anytime I tried to look into
00:12:16 how it might work,
00:12:18 I would then inevitably be attaching
00:12:20 my kind of thought processes into it.
00:12:22 And I wanted to try and put a bubble around it.
00:12:24 I would say, no, this is alien in its most alien form.
00:12:29 I have no real point of contact.
00:12:32 So unfortunately I can’t talk to Stanley Kubrick.
00:12:37 So I’m really fortunate to get a chance to talk to you.
00:12:41 On this particular notion,
00:12:45 I’d like to ask it a bunch of different ways
00:12:48 and we’ll explore it in different ways,
00:12:49 but do you ever consider human imagination,
00:12:52 your imagination as a window into a possible future?
00:12:57 And that what you’re doing,
00:12:59 you’re putting that imagination on paper as a writer
00:13:02 and then on screen as a director.
00:13:04 And that plants the seeds in the minds of millions
00:13:07 of future and current scientists.
00:13:10 And so your imagination, you putting it down
00:13:13 actually makes it as a reality.
00:13:14 So it’s almost like a first step of the scientific method
00:13:18 that you imagining what’s possible
00:13:20 in your new series with Ex Machina
00:13:23 is actually inspiring thousands of 12 year olds,
00:13:28 millions of scientists
00:13:30 and actually creating the future view of imagine.
00:13:34 Well, all I could say is that from my point of view,
00:13:37 it’s almost exactly the reverse
00:13:39 because I see that pretty much everything I do
00:13:45 is a reaction to what scientists are doing.
00:13:50 I’m an interested lay person.
00:13:53 And I feel this individual,
00:13:58 I feel that the most interesting area
00:14:02 that humans are involved in is science.
00:14:05 I think art is very, very interesting,
00:14:07 but the most interesting is science.
00:14:09 And science is in a weird place
00:14:12 because maybe around the time Newton was alive,
00:14:18 if a very, very interested lay person said to themselves,
00:14:21 I want to really understand what Newton is saying
00:14:23 about the way the world works
00:14:25 with a few years of dedicated thinking,
00:14:28 they would be able to understand
00:14:32 the sort of principles he was laying out.
00:14:34 And I don’t think that’s true anymore.
00:14:35 I think that’s stopped being true now.
00:14:37 So I’m pretty smart guy.
00:14:41 And if I said to myself,
00:14:43 I want to really, really understand
00:14:47 what is currently the state of quantum mechanics
00:14:51 or string theory or any of the sort of branching areas of it,
00:14:54 I wouldn’t be able to.
00:14:56 I’d be intellectually incapable of doing it
00:14:59 because to work in those fields at the moment
00:15:02 is a bit like being an athlete.
00:15:03 I suspect you need to start when you’re 12, you know?
00:15:06 And if you start in your mid 20s,
00:15:09 start trying to understand in your mid 20s,
00:15:11 then you’re just never going to catch up.
00:15:13 That’s the way it feels to me.
00:15:15 So what I do is I try to make myself open.
00:15:19 So the people that you’re implying maybe I would influence,
00:15:24 to me, it’s exactly the other way around.
00:15:25 These people are strongly influencing me.
00:15:28 I’m thinking they’re doing something fascinating.
00:15:30 I’m concentrating and working as hard as I can
00:15:32 to try and understand the implications of what they say.
00:15:35 And in some ways, often what I’m trying to do
00:15:38 is disseminate their ideas
00:15:42 into a means by which it can enter a public conversation.
00:15:50 So Ex Machina contains lots of name checks,
00:15:53 all sorts of existing thought experiments,
00:15:58 shadows on Plato’s cave and Mary in the black and white room
00:16:02 and all sorts of different longstanding thought processes
00:16:07 about sentience or consciousness or subjectivity
00:16:12 or gender or whatever it happens to be.
00:16:14 And then I’m trying to marshal that into a narrative
00:16:17 to say, look, this stuff is interesting
00:16:19 and it’s also relevant and this is my best shot at it.
00:16:23 So I’m the one being influenced in my construction.
00:16:27 That’s fascinating.
00:16:28 Of course you would say that
00:16:31 because you’re not even aware of your own.
00:16:33 That’s probably what Kubrick would say too, right?
00:16:35 Is in describing why, how 9,000 is created
00:16:40 the way how 9,000 is created,
00:16:42 is you’re just studying what’s,
00:16:43 but the reality when the specifics of the knowledge
00:16:48 passes through your imagination,
00:16:50 I would argue that you’re incorrect
00:16:53 in thinking that you’re just disseminating knowledge
00:16:56 that the very act of your imagination consuming that science,
00:17:05 it creates something that creates the next step,
00:17:09 potentially creates the next step.
00:17:11 I certainly think that’s true with 2001 A Space Odyssey.
00:17:15 I think at its best, and if it fails.
00:17:18 It’s true of that, yeah, it’s true of that, definitely.
00:17:21 At its best, it plans something.
00:17:23 It’s hard to describe it.
00:17:24 It inspires the next generation
00:17:29 and it could be field dependent.
00:17:31 So your new series has more a connection to physics,
00:17:35 quantum physics, quantum mechanics, quantum computing,
00:17:37 and yet Ex Machina has more artificial intelligence.
00:17:40 I know more about AI.
00:17:43 My sense that AI is much earlier
00:17:48 in the depth of its understanding.
00:17:51 I would argue nobody understands anything
00:17:55 to the depth that physicists do about physics.
00:17:57 In AI, nobody understands AI,
00:18:00 that there is a lot of importance and role for imagination,
00:18:03 which I think we’re in that,
00:18:05 where Freud imagined the subconscious,
00:18:08 we’re in that stage of AI,
00:18:10 where there’s a lot of imagination needed
00:18:12 thinking outside the box.
00:18:14 Yeah, it’s interesting.
00:18:15 The spread of discussions and the spread of anxieties
00:18:21 that exists about AI fascinate me.
00:18:24 The way in which some people seem terrified about it
00:18:30 whilst also pursuing it.
00:18:32 And I’ve never shared that fear about AI personally,
00:18:38 but the way in which it agitates people
00:18:42 and also the people who it agitates,
00:18:44 I find kind of fascinating.
00:18:47 Are you afraid?
00:18:49 Are you excited?
00:18:51 Are you sad by the possibility,
00:18:54 let’s take the existential risk
00:18:56 of artificial intelligence,
00:18:58 by the possibility an artificial intelligence system
00:19:02 becomes our offspring and makes us obsolete?
00:19:07 I mean, it’s a huge subject to talk about, I suppose.
00:19:10 But one of the things I think is that humans
00:19:13 are actually very experienced at creating new life forms
00:19:19 because that’s why you and I are both here
00:19:23 and it’s why everyone on the planet is here.
00:19:24 And so something in the process of having a living thing
00:19:29 that exists that didn’t exist previously
00:19:31 is very much encoded into the structures of our life
00:19:35 and the structures of our societies.
00:19:37 Doesn’t mean we always get it right,
00:19:38 but it does mean we’ve learned quite a lot about that.
00:19:42 We’ve learned quite a lot about what the dangers are
00:19:45 of allowing things to be unchecked.
00:19:49 And it’s why we then create systems
00:19:51 of checks and balances in our government
00:19:54 and so on and so forth.
00:19:55 I mean, that’s not to say,
00:19:57 the other thing is it seems like
00:19:59 there’s all sorts of things that you could put
00:20:01 into a machine that you would not be.
00:20:04 So with us, we sort of roughly try to give some rules
00:20:07 to live by and some of us then live by those rules
00:20:10 and some don’t.
00:20:11 And with a machine,
00:20:12 it feels like you could enforce those things.
00:20:13 So partly because of our previous experience
00:20:17 and partly because of the different nature of a machine,
00:20:19 I just don’t feel anxious about it.
00:20:22 More I just see all the good that,
00:20:25 broadly speaking, the good that can come from it.
00:20:28 But that’s just where I am on that anxiety spectrum.
00:20:32 You know, it’s kind of, there’s a sadness.
00:20:34 So we as humans give birth to other humans, right?
00:20:37 But there’s generations.
00:20:39 And there’s often in the older generation,
00:20:41 a sadness about what the world has become now.
00:20:44 I mean, that’s kind of…
00:20:44 Yeah, there is, but there’s a counterpoint as well,
00:20:47 which is that most parents would wish
00:20:51 for a better life for their children.
00:20:53 So there may be a regret about some things about the past,
00:20:57 but broadly speaking, what people really want
00:20:59 is that things will be better
00:21:00 for the future generations, not worse.
00:21:02 And so, and then it’s a question about
00:21:06 what constitutes a future generation.
00:21:07 A future generation could involve people.
00:21:09 It also could involve machines
00:21:11 and it could involve a sort of cross pollinated version
00:21:14 of the two or any, but none of those things
00:21:17 make me feel anxious.
00:21:19 It doesn’t give you anxiety.
00:21:21 It doesn’t excite you?
00:21:23 Like anything that’s new?
00:21:24 It does.
00:21:25 Not anything that’s new.
00:21:26 I don’t think, for example, I’ve got,
00:21:29 my anxieties relate to things like social media
00:21:32 that, so I’ve got plenty of anxieties about that.
00:21:35 Which is also driven by artificial intelligence
00:21:38 in the sense that there’s too much information
00:21:41 to be able to, an algorithm has to filter that information
00:21:45 and present to you.
00:21:46 So ultimately the algorithm, a simple,
00:21:49 oftentimes simple algorithm is controlling
00:21:52 the flow of information on social media.
00:21:54 So that’s another form of AI.
00:21:57 But at least my sense of it, I might be wrong,
00:21:59 but my sense of it is that the algorithms have
00:22:03 an either conscious or unconscious bias,
00:22:06 which is created by the people
00:22:07 who are making the algorithms
00:22:08 and sort of delineating the areas
00:22:13 to which those algorithms are gonna lean.
00:22:15 And so for example, the kind of thing I’d be worried about
00:22:19 is that it hasn’t been thought about enough
00:22:21 how dangerous it is to allow algorithms
00:22:24 to create echo chambers, say.
00:22:26 But that doesn’t seem to me to be about the AI
00:22:30 or the algorithm.
00:22:32 It’s the naivety of the people
00:22:34 who are constructing the algorithms to do that thing.
00:22:38 If you see what I mean.
00:22:39 Yes.
00:22:40 So in your new series, Devs,
00:22:43 and we could speak more broadly,
00:22:45 there’s a, let’s talk about the people
00:22:47 constructing those algorithms,
00:22:49 which in our modern society, Silicon Valley,
00:22:51 those algorithms happen to be a source of a lot of income
00:22:54 because of advertisements.
00:22:56 So let me ask sort of a question about those people.
00:23:01 Are current concerns and failures on social media,
00:23:04 their naivety?
00:23:06 I can’t pronounce that word well.
00:23:08 Are they naive?
00:23:09 Are they, I use that word carefully,
00:23:14 but evil in intent or misaligned in intent?
00:23:20 I think that’s a, do they mean well
00:23:23 and just go have an unintended consequence?
00:23:27 Or is there something dark in them
00:23:29 that results in them creating a company
00:23:33 results in that super competitive drive to be successful.
00:23:37 And those are the people that will end up
00:23:38 controlling the algorithms.
00:23:41 At a guess, I’d say there are instances
00:23:43 of all those things.
00:23:44 So sometimes I think it’s naivety.
00:23:47 Sometimes I think it’s extremely dark.
00:23:49 And sometimes I think people are not being naive or dark.
00:23:56 And then in those instances are sometimes
00:24:01 generating things that are very benign
00:24:02 and other times generating things
00:24:05 that despite their best intentions are not very benign.
00:24:07 It’s something, I think the reason why I don’t get anxious
00:24:11 about AI in terms of, or at least AIs that have,
00:24:20 I don’t know, a relationship with,
00:24:22 some sort of relationship with humans
00:24:24 is that I think that’s the stuff we’re quite well equipped
00:24:27 to understand how to mitigate.
00:24:31 The problem is issues that relate actually
00:24:37 to the power of humans or the wealth of humans.
00:24:41 And that’s where it’s dangerous here and now.
00:24:45 So what I see, I’ll tell you what I sometimes feel
00:24:50 about Silicon Valley is that it’s like Wall Street
00:24:55 in the 80s.
00:24:58 It’s rabidly capitalistic, absolutely rabidly capitalistic
00:25:03 and it’s rabidly greedy.
00:25:06 But whereas in the 80s, the sense one had of Wall Street
00:25:12 was that these people kind of knew they were sharks
00:25:15 and in a way relished in being sharks
00:25:17 and dressed in sharp suits and kind of lorded
00:25:23 over other people and felt good about doing it.
00:25:26 Silicon Valley has managed to hide
00:25:27 its voracious Wall Street like capitalism
00:25:30 behind hipster T shirts and cool cafes in the place
00:25:35 where they set up there.
00:25:37 And so that obfuscates what’s really going on
00:25:40 and what’s really going on is the absolute voracious pursuit
00:25:44 of money and power.
00:25:45 So that’s where it gets shaky for me.
00:25:48 So that veneer and you explore that brilliantly,
00:25:53 that veneer of virtue that Silicon Valley has.
00:25:57 Which they believe themselves, I’m sure for a long time.
00:26:01 Okay, I hope to be one of those people and I believe that.
00:26:11 So as maybe a devil’s advocate term,
00:26:15 poorly used in this case,
00:26:19 what if some of them really are trying
00:26:20 to build a better world?
00:26:21 I can’t.
00:26:22 I’m sure I think some of them are.
00:26:24 I think I’ve spoken to ones who I believe in their heart
00:26:26 feel they’re building a better world.
00:26:27 Are they not able to?
00:26:29 No, they may or may not be,
00:26:31 but it’s just as a zone with a lot of bullshit flying about.
00:26:35 And there’s also another thing,
00:26:36 which is this actually goes back to,
00:26:41 I always thought about some sports
00:26:44 that later turned out to be corrupt
00:26:46 in the way that the sport,
00:26:47 like who won the boxing match
00:26:49 or how a football match got thrown or cricket match
00:26:54 or whatever happened to be.
00:26:55 And I used to think, well, look,
00:26:56 if there’s a lot of money
00:26:59 and there really is a lot of money,
00:27:00 people stand to make millions or even billions,
00:27:03 you will find a corruption that’s gonna happen.
00:27:05 So it’s in the nature of its voracious appetite
00:27:12 that some people will be corrupt
00:27:14 and some people will exploit
00:27:16 and some people will exploit
00:27:17 whilst thinking they’re doing something good.
00:27:19 But there are also people who I think are very, very smart
00:27:23 and very benign and actually very self aware.
00:27:26 And so I’m not trying to,
00:27:29 I’m not trying to wipe out the motivations
00:27:32 of this entire area.
00:27:34 But I do, there are people in that world
00:27:37 who scare the hell out of me.
00:27:38 Yeah, sure.
00:27:40 Yeah, I’m a little bit naive in that,
00:27:42 like I don’t care at all about money.
00:27:45 And so I’m a…
00:27:50 You might be one of the good guys.
00:27:52 Yeah, but so the thought is, but I don’t have money.
00:27:55 So my thought is if you give me a billion dollars,
00:27:58 I would, it would change nothing
00:28:00 and I would spend it right away
00:28:01 on investing it right back and creating a good world.
00:28:04 But your intuition is that billion,
00:28:07 there’s something about that money
00:28:08 that maybe slowly corrupts the people around you.
00:28:13 There’s somebody gets in that corrupts your soul
00:28:16 the way you view the world.
00:28:17 Money does corrupt, we know that.
00:28:20 But there’s a different sort of problem
00:28:22 aside from just the money corrupts thing
00:28:26 that we’re familiar with throughout history.
00:28:30 And it’s more about the sense of reinforcement
00:28:34 an individual gets, which is so…
00:28:37 It effectively works like the reason I earned all this money
00:28:42 and so much more money than anyone else
00:28:44 is because I’m very gifted.
00:28:46 I’m actually a bit smarter than they are,
00:28:47 or I’m a lot smarter than they are,
00:28:49 and I can see the future in the way they can’t.
00:28:52 And maybe some of those people are not particularly smart,
00:28:55 they’re very lucky,
00:28:56 or they’re very talented entrepreneurs.
00:28:59 And there’s a difference between…
00:29:02 So in other words, the acquisition of the money and power
00:29:05 can suddenly start to feel like evidence of virtue.
00:29:08 And it’s not evidence of virtue,
00:29:09 it might be evidence of completely different things.
00:29:11 That’s brilliantly put, yeah.
00:29:13 Yeah, that’s brilliantly put.
00:29:15 So I think one of the fundamental drivers
00:29:18 of my current morality…
00:29:20 Let me just represent nerds in general of all kinds,
00:29:27 is of constant self doubt and the signals…
00:29:33 I’m very sensitive to signals from people that tell me
00:29:36 I’m doing the wrong thing.
00:29:38 But when there’s a huge inflow of money,
00:29:42 you just put it brilliantly
00:29:44 that that could become an overpowering signal
00:29:46 that everything you do is right.
00:29:49 And so your moral compass can just get thrown off.
00:29:53 Yeah, and that is not contained to Silicon Valley,
00:29:57 that’s across the board.
00:29:58 In general, yeah.
00:29:59 Like I said, I’m from the Soviet Union,
00:30:01 the current president is convinced, I believe,
00:30:05 actually he wants to do really good by the country
00:30:09 and by the world,
00:30:10 but his moral compass may be off because…
00:30:14 Yeah, I mean, it’s the interesting thing about evil,
00:30:17 which is that I think most people
00:30:20 who do spectacularly evil things think themselves
00:30:24 they’re doing really good things.
00:30:25 That they’re not there thinking,
00:30:27 I am a sort of incarnation of Satan.
00:30:29 They’re thinking, yeah, I’ve seen a way to fix the world
00:30:33 and everyone else is wrong, here I go.
00:30:35 In fact, I’m having a fascinating conversation
00:30:39 with a historian of Stalin, and he took power.
00:30:42 He actually got more power
00:30:47 than almost any person in history.
00:30:49 And he wanted, he didn’t want power.
00:30:52 He just wanted, he truly,
00:30:54 and this is what people don’t realize,
00:30:55 he truly believed that communism
00:30:58 will make for a better world.
00:31:00 Absolutely.
00:31:01 And he wanted power.
00:31:02 He wanted to destroy the competition
00:31:04 to make sure that we actually make communism work
00:31:07 in the Soviet Union and then spread across the world.
00:31:10 He was trying to do good.
00:31:12 I think it’s typically the case
00:31:16 that that’s what people think they’re doing.
00:31:17 And I think that, but you don’t need to go to Stalin.
00:31:21 I mean, Stalin, I think Stalin probably got pretty crazy,
00:31:24 but actually that’s another part of it,
00:31:26 which is that the other thing that comes
00:31:29 from being convinced of your own virtue
00:31:31 is that then you stop listening to the modifiers around you.
00:31:34 And that tends to drive people crazy.
00:31:37 It’s other people that keep us sane.
00:31:40 And if you stop listening to them,
00:31:42 I think you go a bit mad.
00:31:43 That also happens.
00:31:44 That’s funny.
00:31:45 Disagreement keeps us sane.
00:31:47 To jump back for an entire generation of AI researchers,
00:31:53 2001, a Space Odyssey, put an image,
00:31:56 the idea of human level, superhuman level intelligence
00:31:59 into their mind.
00:32:00 Do you ever, sort of jumping back to Ex Machina
00:32:04 and talk a little bit about that,
00:32:06 do you ever consider the audience of people
00:32:08 who build the systems, the roboticists, the scientists
00:32:13 that build the systems based on the stories you create,
00:32:17 which I would argue, I mean, there’s literally
00:32:20 most of the top researchers about 40, 50 years old and plus,
00:32:27 that’s their favorite movie, 2001 Space Odyssey.
00:32:29 And it really is in their work, their idea of what ethics is,
00:32:33 of what is the target, the hope, the dangers of AI,
00:32:37 is that movie, right?
00:32:39 Do you ever consider the impact on those researchers
00:32:43 when you create the work you do?
00:32:46 Certainly not with Ex Machina in relation to 2001,
00:32:51 because I’m not sure, I mean, I’d be pleased if there was,
00:32:54 but I’m not sure in a way there isn’t a fundamental
00:32:58 discussion of issues to do with AI that isn’t already
00:33:03 and better dealt with by 2001.
00:33:07 2001 does a very, very good account of the way
00:33:13 in which an AI might think and also potential issues
00:33:17 with the way the AI might think.
00:33:19 And also then a separate question about whether the AI
00:33:23 is malevolent or benevolent.
00:33:26 And 2001 doesn’t really, it’s a slightly odd thing
00:33:30 to be making a film when you know there’s a preexisting film
00:33:33 which is not a really superb job.
00:33:35 But there’s questions of consciousness, embodiment,
00:33:38 and also the same kinds of questions.
00:33:40 Because those are my two favorite AI movies.
00:33:42 So can you compare Hal 9000 and Ava,
00:33:46 Hal 9000 from 2001 Space Odyssey and Ava from Ex Machina?
00:33:50 The, in your view, from a philosophical perspective.
00:33:53 But they’ve got different goals.
00:33:54 The two AIs have completely different goals.
00:33:56 I think that’s really the difference.
00:33:58 So in some respects, Ex Machina took as a premise
00:34:02 how do you assess whether something else has consciousness?
00:34:06 So it was a version of the Turing test,
00:34:07 except instead of having the machine hidden,
00:34:10 you put the machine in plain sight
00:34:13 in the way that we are in plain sight of each other
00:34:15 and say now assess the consciousness.
00:34:17 And the way it was illustrating the way in which you’d assess
00:34:22 the state of consciousness of a machine
00:34:24 is exactly the same way we assess
00:34:26 the state of consciousness of each other.
00:34:28 And in exactly the same way that in a funny way,
00:34:31 your sense of my consciousness is actually based
00:34:34 primarily on your own consciousness.
00:34:37 That is also then true with the machine.
00:34:41 And so it was actually about how much of
00:34:45 the sense of consciousness is a projection
00:34:47 rather than something that consciousness
00:34:49 is actually containing.
00:34:50 And has Plato’s cave, I mean, this you really explored,
00:34:53 you could argue that how sort of Space Odyssey explores
00:34:57 idea of the Turing test for intelligence,
00:34:58 they’re not tests, there’s no test,
00:35:00 but it’s more focused on intelligence.
00:35:03 And Ex Machina kind of goes around intelligence
00:35:08 and says the consciousness of the human to human,
00:35:11 human to robot interactions more interest,
00:35:13 more important, more at least the focus
00:35:15 of that particular movie.
00:35:18 Yeah, it’s about the interior state
00:35:20 and what constitutes the interior state
00:35:23 and how do we know it’s there?
00:35:25 And actually in that respect,
00:35:27 Ex Machina is as much about consciousness in general
00:35:32 as it is to do specifically with machine consciousness.
00:35:36 Yes.
00:35:37 And it’s also interesting,
00:35:38 you know that thing you started asking about,
00:35:40 the dream state, and I was saying,
00:35:42 well, I think we’re all in a dream state
00:35:43 because we’re all in a subjective state.
00:35:46 One of the things that I became aware of with Ex Machina
00:35:52 is that the way in which people reacted to the film
00:35:55 was very based on what they took into the film.
00:35:57 So many people thought Ex Machina was the tale
00:36:01 of a sort of evil robot who murders two men and escapes.
00:36:05 And she has no empathy, for example,
00:36:09 because she’s a machine.
00:36:10 Whereas I felt, no, she was a conscious being
00:36:14 with a consciousness different from mine, but so what,
00:36:18 imprisoned and made a bunch of value judgments
00:36:22 about how to get out of that box.
00:36:25 And there’s a moment which it sort of slightly bugs me,
00:36:29 but nobody ever has noticed it and it’s years after,
00:36:31 so I might as well say it now,
00:36:33 which is that after Ava has escaped,
00:36:36 she crosses a room and as she’s crossing a room,
00:36:39 this is just before she leaves the building,
00:36:42 she looks over her shoulder and she smiles.
00:36:44 And I thought after all the conversation about tests,
00:36:49 in a way, the best indication you could have
00:36:52 of the interior state of someone
00:36:54 is if they are not being observed
00:36:57 and they smile about something
00:36:59 with their smiling for themself.
00:37:01 And that to me was evidence of Ava’s true sentience,
00:37:05 whatever that sentience was.
00:37:07 Oh, that’s really interesting, we don’t get to observe Ava much
00:37:12 or something like a smile in any context
00:37:16 except through interaction,
00:37:17 trying to convince others that she’s conscious,
00:37:20 that’s beautiful.
00:37:21 Exactly, yeah.
00:37:22 But it was a small, in a funny way,
00:37:25 I think maybe people saw it as an evil smile,
00:37:28 like, ha, I fooled them.
00:37:32 But actually it was just a smile.
00:37:34 And I thought, well, in the end,
00:37:35 after all the conversations about the test,
00:37:37 that was the answer to the test and then off she goes.
00:37:39 So if we align, if we just linger a little bit longer
00:37:44 on Hal and Ava, do you think in terms of motivation,
00:37:49 what was Hal’s motivation?
00:37:51 Is Hal good or evil?
00:37:54 Is Ava good or evil?
00:37:57 Ava’s good, in my opinion, and Hal is neutral
00:38:03 because I don’t think Hal is presented
00:38:06 as having a sophisticated emotional life.
00:38:11 He has a set of paradigms,
00:38:14 which is that the mission needs to be completed.
00:38:16 I mean, it’s a version of the paperclip.
00:38:18 Yeah.
00:38:19 The idea that it’s just, it’s a super intelligent machine,
00:38:23 but it’s just performed a particular task
00:38:25 and in doing that task may destroy everybody on Earth
00:38:28 or may achieve undesirable effects for us humans.
00:38:32 Precisely, yeah.
00:38:33 But what if…
00:38:34 At the very end, he says something like I’m afraid, Dave,
00:38:38 but that may be he is on some level experiencing fear
00:38:44 or it may be this is the terms in which it would be wise
00:38:49 to stop someone from doing the thing they’re doing,
00:38:52 if you see what I mean.
00:38:53 Yes, absolutely.
00:38:54 So actually that’s funny.
00:38:55 So that’s such a small, short exploration of consciousness
00:39:00 that I’m afraid, and then you just with ex machina say,
00:39:03 okay, we’re gonna magnify that part
00:39:05 and then minimize the other part.
00:39:07 That’s a good way to sort of compare the two.
00:39:09 But if you could just use your imagination,
00:39:13 if Ava sort of, I don’t know,
00:39:19 ran the, was president of the United States,
00:39:23 so had some power.
00:39:24 So what kind of world would you want to create?
00:39:27 If you kind of say good, and there is a sense
00:39:32 that she has a really, like there’s a desire
00:39:36 for a better human to human interaction,
00:39:40 human to robot interaction in her.
00:39:42 But what kind of world do you think she would create
00:39:44 with that desire?
00:39:46 See, that’s a really, that’s a very interesting question.
00:39:48 I’m gonna approach it slightly obliquely,
00:39:52 which is that if a friend of yours
00:39:55 got stabbed in a mugging, and you then felt very angry
00:40:01 at the person who’d done the stabbing,
00:40:04 but then you learned that it was a 15 year old
00:40:06 and the 15 year old, both their parents were addicted
00:40:09 to crystal meth and the kid had been addicted
00:40:12 since he was 10.
00:40:13 And he really never had any hope in the world.
00:40:15 And he’d been driven crazy by his upbringing
00:40:17 and did the stabbing that would hugely modify.
00:40:22 And it would also make you wary about that kid
00:40:25 then becoming president of America.
00:40:27 And Ava has had a very, very distorted introduction
00:40:32 into the world.
00:40:33 So, although there’s nothing as it were organically
00:40:38 within Ava that would lean her towards badness,
00:40:43 it’s not that robots or sentient robots are bad.
00:40:47 She did not, her arrival into the world
00:40:51 was being imprisoned by humans.
00:40:53 So, I’m not sure she’d be a great president.
00:40:57 The trajectory through which she arrived
00:41:00 at her moral views have some dark elements.
00:41:05 But I like Ava personally, I like Ava.
00:41:08 Would you vote for her?
00:41:11 I’m having difficulty finding anyone to vote for
00:41:14 in my country or if I lived here in yours.
00:41:17 I am.
00:41:19 So, that’s a yes, I guess, because I’m not sure
00:41:21 Yes, I guess, because of the competition.
00:41:23 She could easily do a better job than any of the people
00:41:25 we’ve got around at the moment.
00:41:27 I’d vote her over Boris Johnson.
00:41:32 So, what is a good test of consciousness?
00:41:36 We talk about consciousness a little bit more.
00:41:38 If something appears conscious, is it conscious?
00:41:42 You mentioned the smile, which seems to be something done.
00:41:47 I mean, that’s a really good indication
00:41:49 because it’s a tree falling in the forest
00:41:52 with nobody there to hear it.
00:41:53 But does the appearance from a robotics perspective
00:41:57 of consciousness mean consciousness to you?
00:41:59 No, I don’t think you could say that fully
00:42:02 because I think you could then easily have
00:42:05 a thought experiment which said,
00:42:06 we will create something which we know is not conscious
00:42:09 but is going to give a very, very good account
00:42:13 of seeming conscious.
00:42:13 And so, and also it would be a particularly bad test
00:42:17 where humans are involved because humans are so quick
00:42:20 to project sentience into things that don’t have sentience.
00:42:26 So, someone could have their computer playing up
00:42:29 and feel as if their computer is being malevolent to them
00:42:31 when it clearly isn’t.
00:42:32 And so, of all the things to judge consciousness, us.
00:42:38 Humans are bad at it.
00:42:39 We’re empathy machines.
00:42:40 So, the flip side of it is that
00:42:42 so the flip side of that,
00:42:44 the argument there is because we just attribute consciousness
00:42:48 to everything almost and anthropomorphize everything
00:42:52 including Roombas, that maybe consciousness is not real,
00:42:57 that we just attribute consciousness to each other.
00:43:00 So, you have a sense that there is something really special
00:43:03 going on in our mind that makes us unique
00:43:07 and gives us this subjective experience.
00:43:10 There’s something very interesting going on in our minds.
00:43:13 I’m slightly worried about the word special
00:43:16 because it gets a bit, it nudges towards metaphysics
00:43:20 and maybe even magic.
00:43:23 I mean, in some ways, something magic like,
00:43:27 which I don’t think is there at all.
00:43:29 I mean, if you think about,
00:43:30 so there’s an idea called panpsychism
00:43:33 that says consciousness is in everything.
00:43:34 Yeah, I don’t buy that.
00:43:36 I don’t buy that.
00:43:37 Yeah, so the idea that there is a thing
00:43:39 that it would be like to be the sun.
00:43:42 Yeah, no, I don’t buy that.
00:43:44 I think that consciousness is a thing.
00:43:48 My sort of broad modification is that usually
00:43:51 the more I find out about things,
00:43:54 the more illusory our instinct is
00:44:00 and is leading us into a different direction
00:44:02 about what that thing actually is.
00:44:04 That happens, it seems to me in modern science,
00:44:07 that happens a hell of a lot,
00:44:10 whether it’s to do with even how big or small things are.
00:44:13 So my sense is that consciousness is a thing,
00:44:16 but it isn’t quite the thing
00:44:18 or maybe very different from the thing
00:44:20 that we instinctively think it is.
00:44:22 So it’s there, it’s very interesting,
00:44:24 but we may be in sort of quite fundamentally
00:44:28 misunderstanding it for reasons that are based on intuition.
00:44:33 So I have to ask, this is kind of an interesting question.
00:44:38 The Ex Machina for many people, including myself,
00:44:42 is one of the greatest AI films ever made.
00:44:44 It’s number two for me.
00:44:45 Thanks.
00:44:46 Yeah, it’s definitely not number one.
00:44:48 If it was number one, I’d really have to, anyway, yeah.
00:44:50 Whenever you grow up with something, right,
00:44:52 whenever you grow up with something, it’s in the mud.
00:44:56 But there’s, one of the things that people bring up,
00:45:01 and can’t please everyone, including myself,
00:45:04 this is what I first reacted to the film,
00:45:06 is the idea of the lone genius.
00:45:09 This is the criticism that people say,
00:45:12 sort of me as an AI researcher,
00:45:14 I’m trying to create what Nathan is trying to do.
00:45:19 So there’s a brilliant series called Chernobyl.
00:45:23 Yes, it’s fantastic.
00:45:24 Absolutely spectacular.
00:45:26 I mean, they got so many things brilliant or right.
00:45:30 But one of the things, again, the criticism there.
00:45:32 Yeah, they conflated lots of people into one.
00:45:34 Into one character that represents all nuclear scientists,
00:45:37 Ivana Komiak.
00:45:42 It’s a composite character that presents all scientists.
00:45:46 Is this what you were,
00:45:47 is this the way you were thinking about that?
00:45:49 Or is it just simplifies the storytelling?
00:45:51 How do you think about the lone genius?
00:45:53 Well, I’d say this, the series I’m doing at the moment
00:45:56 is a critique in part of the lone genius concept.
00:46:01 So yes, I’m sort of oppositional
00:46:03 and either agnostic or atheistic about that as a concept.
00:46:08 I mean, not entirely.
00:46:12 Whether lone is the right word, broadly isolated,
00:46:15 but Newton clearly exists in a sort of bubble of himself,
00:46:21 in some respects, so does Shakespeare.
00:46:22 So do you think we would have an iPhone without Steve Jobs?
00:46:25 I mean, how much contribution from a genius?
00:46:28 Steve Jobs clearly isn’t a lone genius
00:46:29 because there’s too many other people
00:46:32 in the sort of superstructure around him
00:46:33 who are absolutely fundamental to that journey.
00:46:38 But you’re saying Newton, but that’s a scientific,
00:46:40 so there’s an engineering element to building Ava.
00:46:44 But just to say, what Ex Machina is really,
00:46:48 it’s a thought experiment.
00:46:50 I mean, so it’s a construction
00:46:52 of putting four people in a house.
00:46:56 Nothing about Ex Machina adds up in all sorts of ways,
00:47:00 in as much as the, who built the machine parts?
00:47:03 Did the people building the machine parts
00:47:05 know what they were creating and how did they get there?
00:47:08 And it’s a thought experiment.
00:47:11 So it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny of that sort.
00:47:14 I don’t think it’s actually that interesting of a question,
00:47:18 but it’s brought up so often that I had to ask it
00:47:22 because that’s exactly how I felt after a while.
00:47:27 There’s something about, there was almost a defense,
00:47:30 like I watched your movie the first time
00:47:33 and at least for the first little while in a defensive way,
00:47:36 like how dare this person try to step into the AI space
00:47:40 and try to beat Kubrick.
00:47:43 That’s the way I was thinking,
00:47:45 because it comes off as a movie that really is going
00:47:48 after the deep fundamental questions about AI.
00:47:50 So there’s a kind of a nerd do this,
00:47:53 like it’s automatically searching for the flaws.
00:47:57 And I did.
00:47:58 I do exactly the same.
00:48:00 I think in Annihilation, in the other movie,
00:48:03 I was be able to free myself from that much quicker
00:48:06 that it is a thought experiment.
00:48:08 There’s, who cares if there’s batteries
00:48:10 that don’t run out, right?
00:48:12 Those kinds of questions, that’s the whole point.
00:48:14 But it’s nevertheless something I wanted to bring up.
00:48:18 Yeah, it’s a fair thing to bring up.
00:48:20 For me, you hit on the lone genius thing.
00:48:24 For me, it was actually, people always said,
00:48:27 Ex Machina makes this big leap in terms of where AI
00:48:31 has got to and also what AI would look like
00:48:34 if it got to that point.
00:48:36 There’s another one, which is just robotics.
00:48:38 I mean, look at the way Ava walks around a room.
00:48:42 It’s like, forget it, building that.
00:48:44 That’s also got to be a very, very long way off.
00:48:47 And if you did get there, would it look anything like that?
00:48:49 It’s a thought experiment.
00:48:50 Actually, I disagree with you.
00:48:51 I think the way, as a ballerina, Alicia Vikander,
00:48:56 brilliant actress, actor that moves around,
00:49:01 we’re very far away from creating that.
00:49:03 But the way she moves around is exactly
00:49:06 the definition of perfection for a roboticist.
00:49:08 It’s like smooth and efficient.
00:49:09 So it is where we wanna get, I believe.
00:49:12 I think, so I hang out with a lot
00:49:15 of like human robotics people.
00:49:16 They love elegant, smooth motion like that.
00:49:20 That’s their dream.
00:49:21 So the way she moved is actually what I believe
00:49:23 that would dream for a robot to move.
00:49:25 It might not be that useful to move that sort of that way,
00:49:29 but that is the definition of perfection
00:49:32 in terms of movement.
00:49:34 Drawing inspiration from real life.
00:49:35 So for devs, for Ex Machina,
00:49:39 look at characters like Elon Musk.
00:49:42 What do you think about the various big technological
00:49:44 efforts of Elon Musk and others like him
00:49:48 and that he’s involved with such as Tesla,
00:49:51 SpaceX, Neuralink, do you see any of that technology
00:49:55 potentially defining the future worlds
00:49:57 you create in your work?
00:49:58 So Tesla’s automation, SpaceX’s space exploration,
00:50:02 Neuralink is brain machine interface,
00:50:05 somehow merger of biological and electric systems.
00:50:09 I’m in a way I’m influenced by that almost by definition
00:50:13 because that’s the world I live in.
00:50:15 And this is the thing that’s happening in that world.
00:50:17 And I also feel supportive of it.
00:50:20 So I think amongst various things,
00:50:24 Elon Musk has done, I’m almost sure he’s done
00:50:28 a very, very good thing with Tesla for all of us.
00:50:33 It’s really kicked all the other car manufacturers
00:50:36 in the face, it’s kicked the fossil fuel industry
00:50:39 in the face and they needed kicking in the face
00:50:42 and he’s done it.
00:50:43 So that’s the world he’s part of creating
00:50:47 and I live in that world, just bought a Tesla in fact.
00:50:51 And so does that play into whatever I then make
00:50:57 in some ways it does partly because I try to be a writer
00:51:03 who quite often filmmakers are in some ways fixated
00:51:07 on the films they grew up with
00:51:09 and they sort of remake those films in some ways.
00:51:11 I’ve always tried to avoid that.
00:51:13 And so I looked at the real world to get inspiration
00:51:17 and as much as possible sort of by living, I think.
00:51:21 And so yeah, I’m sure.
00:51:24 Which of the directions do you find most exciting?
00:51:28 Space travel.
00:51:30 Space travel.
00:51:31 So you haven’t really explored space travel in your work.
00:51:36 You’ve said something like if you had unlimited amount
00:51:39 of money, I think I read at AMA that you would make
00:51:43 like a multi year series Space Wars or something like that.
00:51:47 So what is it that excites you about space exploration?
00:51:50 Well, because if we have any sort of long term future,
00:51:56 it’s that, it just simply is that.
00:52:00 If energy and matter are linked up in the way
00:52:04 we think they’re linked up, we’ll run out if we don’t move.
00:52:09 So we gotta move.
00:52:11 And, but also, how can we not?
00:52:15 It’s built into us to do it or die trying.
00:52:21 I was on Easter Island a few months ago,
00:52:27 which is, as I’m sure you know, in the middle of the Pacific
00:52:30 and difficult for people to have got to,
00:52:32 but they got there.
00:52:34 And I did think a lot about the way those boats
00:52:37 must have set out into something like space.
00:52:42 It was the ocean and how sort of fundamental
00:52:47 that was to the way we are.
00:52:49 And it’s the one that most excites me
00:52:53 because it’s the one I want most to happen.
00:52:55 It’s the thing, it’s the place
00:52:57 where we could get to as humans.
00:52:59 Like in a way I could live with us never really unlocking
00:53:03 fully unlocking the nature of consciousness.
00:53:06 I’d like to know, I’m really curious,
00:53:09 but if we never leave the solar system
00:53:12 and if we never get further out into this galaxy
00:53:14 or maybe even galaxies beyond our galaxy,
00:53:16 that would, that feels sad to me
00:53:20 because it’s so limiting.
00:53:24 Yeah, there’s something hopeful and beautiful
00:53:26 about reaching out any kind of exploration,
00:53:30 reaching out across Earth centuries ago
00:53:33 and then reaching out into space.
00:53:35 So what do you think about colonization of Mars?
00:53:37 So go to Mars, does that excite you
00:53:38 the idea of a human being stepping foot on Mars?
00:53:41 It does, it absolutely does.
00:53:43 But in terms of what would really excite me,
00:53:45 it would be leaving the solar system
00:53:47 in as much as that I just think,
00:53:49 I think we already know quite a lot about Mars.
00:53:52 And, but yes, listen, if it happened,
00:53:55 that would be, I hope I see it in my lifetime.
00:53:58 I really hope I see it in my lifetime.
00:54:01 So it would be a wonderful thing.
00:54:03 Without giving anything away,
00:54:05 but the series begins with the use of quantum computers.
00:54:11 The new series does,
00:54:13 begins with the use of quantum computers
00:54:14 to simulate basic living organisms,
00:54:17 or actually I don’t know if it’s quantum computers are used,
00:54:19 but basic living organisms are simulated on a screen.
00:54:22 It’s a really cool kind of demo.
00:54:24 Yeah, that’s right.
00:54:25 They’re using, yes, they are using a quantum computer
00:54:28 to simulate a nematode, yeah.
00:54:31 So returning to our discussion of simulation,
00:54:34 or thinking of the universe as a computer,
00:54:38 do you think the universe is deterministic?
00:54:41 Is there a free will?
00:54:43 So with the qualification of what do I know?
00:54:46 Cause I’m a layman, right?
00:54:48 Lay person.
00:54:49 But with a big imagination.
00:54:51 Thanks.
00:54:52 With that qualification,
00:54:54 yup, I think the universe is deterministic
00:54:56 and I see absolutely,
00:54:58 I cannot see how free will fits into that.
00:55:02 So yes, deterministic, no free will.
00:55:05 That would be my position.
00:55:07 And how does that make you feel?
00:55:09 It partly makes me feel that it’s exactly in keeping
00:55:12 with the way these things tend to work out,
00:55:14 which is that we have an incredibly strong sense
00:55:17 that we do have free will.
00:55:20 And just as we have an incredibly strong sense
00:55:24 that time is a constant,
00:55:26 and turns out probably not to be the case.
00:55:30 So we’re definitely in the case of time,
00:55:31 but the problem I always have with free will
00:55:36 is that it gets,
00:55:37 I can never seem to find the place
00:55:40 where it is supposed to reside.
00:55:43 And yet you explore.
00:55:45 Just a bit of very, very,
00:55:46 but we have something we can call free will,
00:55:49 but it’s not the thing that we think it is.
00:55:51 But free will, so do you,
00:55:54 what we call free will is just.
00:55:55 What we call it is the illusion of it.
00:55:56 And that’s a subjective experience of the illusion.
00:56:00 Which is a useful thing to have.
00:56:01 And it partly comes down to,
00:56:04 although we live in a deterministic universe,
00:56:06 our brains are not very well equipped
00:56:08 to fully determine the deterministic universe.
00:56:11 So we’re constantly surprised
00:56:12 and feel like we’re making snap decisions
00:56:15 based on imperfect information.
00:56:17 So that feels a lot like free will.
00:56:19 It just isn’t.
00:56:21 Would be my, that’s my guess.
00:56:24 So in that sense, your sort of sense
00:56:27 is that you can unroll the universe forward or backward
00:56:30 and you will see the same thing.
00:56:33 And you would, I mean, that notion.
00:56:36 Yeah, sort of, sort of.
00:56:38 But yeah, sorry, go ahead.
00:56:40 I mean, that notion is a bit uncomfortable
00:56:44 to think about.
00:56:45 That it’s, you can roll it back.
00:56:50 And forward and.
00:56:53 Well, if you were able to do it,
00:56:55 it would certainly have to be a quantum computer.
00:56:58 Something that worked in a quantum mechanical way
00:57:00 in order to understand a quantum mechanical system, I guess.
00:57:07 And so that unrolling, there might be a multiverse thing
00:57:09 where there’s a bunch of branching.
00:57:11 Well, exactly.
00:57:12 Because it wouldn’t follow that every time
00:57:14 you roll it back or forward,
00:57:15 you’d get exactly the same result.
00:57:17 Which is another thing that’s hard to wrap your mind around.
00:57:21 So yeah, but that, yes.
00:57:24 But essentially what you just described, that.
00:57:27 The yes forwards and yes backwards,
00:57:29 but you might get a slightly different result
00:57:31 or a very different result.
00:57:33 Or very different.
00:57:34 Along the same lines, you’ve explored
00:57:36 some really deep scientific ideas in this new series.
00:57:39 And I mean, just in general,
00:57:41 you’re unafraid to ground yourself
00:57:44 in some of the most amazing scientific ideas of our time.
00:57:49 What are the things you’ve learned
00:57:51 or ideas you find beautiful and mysterious
00:57:53 about quantum mechanics, multiverse,
00:57:55 string theory, quantum computing that you’ve learned?
00:57:58 Well, I would have to say every single thing
00:58:01 I’ve learned is beautiful.
00:58:03 And one of the motivators for me is that
00:58:06 I think that people tend not to see scientific thinking
00:58:13 as being essentially poetic and lyrical.
00:58:17 But I think that is literally exactly what it is.
00:58:20 And I think the idea of entanglement
00:58:23 or the idea of superpositions,
00:58:25 or the fact that you could even demonstrate a superposition
00:58:28 or have a machine that relies on the existence
00:58:31 of superpositions in order to function,
00:58:33 to me is almost indescribably beautiful.
00:58:39 It fills me with awe.
00:58:41 It fills me with awe.
00:58:42 And also it’s not just a sort of grand, massive awe of,
00:58:49 but it’s also delicate.
00:58:51 It’s very, very delicate and subtle.
00:58:54 And it has these beautiful sort of nuances in it.
00:58:59 And also these completely paradigm changing
00:59:03 thoughts and truths.
00:59:04 So it’s as good as it gets as far as I can tell.
00:59:08 So broadly everything.
00:59:10 That doesn’t mean I believe everything I read
00:59:12 in quantum physics.
00:59:14 Because obviously a lot of the interpretations
00:59:17 are completely in conflict with each other.
00:59:18 And who knows whether string theory
00:59:22 will turn out to be a good description or not.
00:59:25 But the beauty in it, it seems undeniable.
00:59:29 And I do wish people more readily understood
00:59:34 how beautiful and poetic science is, I would say.
00:59:41 Science is poetry.
00:59:44 In terms of quantum computing being used to simulate things
00:59:51 or just in general, the idea of simulating,
00:59:54 simulating small parts of our world,
00:59:56 which actually current physicists are really excited about
01:00:00 simulating small quantum mechanical systems
01:00:02 on quantum computers.
01:00:03 But scaling that up to something bigger,
01:00:05 like simulating life forms.
01:00:09 How do you think, what are the possible trajectories
01:00:11 of that going wrong or going right
01:00:14 if you unroll that into the future?
01:00:17 Well, if a bit like Ava and her robotics,
01:00:21 you park the sheer complexity of what you’re trying to do.
01:00:26 The issues are, I think it will have a profound,
01:00:35 if you were able to have a machine
01:00:37 that was able to project forwards and backwards accurately,
01:00:40 it would in an empirical way show,
01:00:42 it would demonstrate that you don’t have free will.
01:00:45 So the first thing that would happen is people
01:00:47 would have to really take on a very, very different idea
01:00:51 of what they were.
01:00:53 The thing that they truly, truly believe they are,
01:00:56 they are not.
01:00:57 And so that I suspect would be very, very disturbing
01:01:01 to a lot of people.
01:01:02 Do you think that has a positive or negative effect
01:01:04 on society, the realization that you are not,
01:01:08 you cannot control your actions essentially,
01:01:11 I guess is the way that could be interpreted?
01:01:13 Yeah, although in some ways we instinctively understand
01:01:17 that already because in the example I gave you of the kid
01:01:20 in the stabbing, we would all understand that that kid
01:01:23 was not really fully in control of their actions.
01:01:25 So it’s not an idea that’s entirely alien to us, but.
01:01:29 I don’t know if we understand that.
01:01:31 I think there’s a bunch of people who see the world
01:01:35 that way, but not everybody.
01:01:37 Yes, true, of course true.
01:01:39 But what this machine would do is prove it beyond any doubt
01:01:43 because someone would say, well, I don’t believe that’s true.
01:01:45 And then you’d predict, well, in 10 seconds,
01:01:48 you’re gonna do this.
01:01:49 And they’d say, no, no, I’m not.
01:01:50 And then they’d do it.
01:01:51 And then determinism would have played its part.
01:01:53 But I, or something like that.
01:01:56 But actually the exact terms of that thought experiment
01:02:00 probably wouldn’t play out, but still broadly speaking,
01:02:03 you could predict something happening in another room,
01:02:06 sort of unseen, I suppose,
01:02:08 that foreknowledge would not allow you to affect.
01:02:10 So what effect would that have?
01:02:13 I think people would find it very disturbing,
01:02:15 but then after they’d got over their sense
01:02:17 of being disturbed, which by the way,
01:02:21 I don’t even think you need a machine
01:02:22 to take this idea on board.
01:02:24 But after they’ve got over that,
01:02:26 they’d still understand that even though I have no free will
01:02:29 and my actions are in effect already determined,
01:02:33 I still feel things.
01:02:36 I still care about stuff.
01:02:39 I remember my daughter saying to me,
01:02:43 she’d got hold of the idea that my view of the universe
01:02:46 made it meaningless.
01:02:48 And she said, well, then it’s meaningless.
01:02:49 And I said, well, I can prove it’s not meaningless
01:02:52 because you mean something to me and I mean something to you.
01:02:56 So it’s not completely meaningless
01:02:58 because there is a bit of meaning contained
01:03:00 within this space.
01:03:01 And so with a lack of free will space,
01:03:06 you could think, well, this robs me of everything I am.
01:03:08 And then you’d say, well, no, it doesn’t
01:03:09 because you still like eating cheeseburgers
01:03:12 and you still like going to see the movies.
01:03:13 And so how big a difference does it really make?
01:03:17 But I think initially people would find it very disturbing.
01:03:21 I think that what would come,
01:03:24 if you could really unlock with a determinism machine,
01:03:27 everything, there’d be this wonderful wisdom
01:03:30 that would come from it.
01:03:31 And I’d rather have that than not.
01:03:34 So that’s a really good example of a technology
01:03:37 revealing to us humans something fundamental about our world,
01:03:40 about our society.
01:03:41 So it’s almost this creation
01:03:45 is helping us understand ourselves.
01:03:47 And the same could be said about artificial intelligence.
01:03:51 So what do you think us creating something like Ava
01:03:55 will help us understand about ourselves?
01:03:58 How will that change society?
01:04:00 Well, I would hope it would teach us some humility.
01:04:05 Humans are very big on exceptionalism.
01:04:07 America is constantly proclaiming itself
01:04:12 to be the greatest nation on earth,
01:04:15 which it may feel like that if you’re an American,
01:04:18 but it may not feel like that if you’re from Finland,
01:04:20 because there’s all sorts of things
01:04:21 you dearly love about Finland.
01:04:23 And exceptionalism is usually bullshit.
01:04:28 Probably not always.
01:04:29 If we both sat here,
01:04:30 we could find a good example of something that isn’t,
01:04:31 but as a rule of thumb.
01:04:34 And what it would do
01:04:36 is it would teach us some humility about,
01:04:40 actually often that’s what science does in a funny way.
01:04:42 It makes us more and more interesting,
01:04:44 but it makes us a smaller and smaller part
01:04:46 of the thing that’s interesting.
01:04:48 And I don’t mind that humility at all.
01:04:52 I don’t think it’s a bad thing.
01:04:53 Our excesses don’t tend to come from humility.
01:04:57 Our excesses come from the opposite,
01:04:59 megalomania and stuff.
01:05:00 We tend to think of consciousness
01:05:02 as having some form of exceptionalism attached to it.
01:05:06 I suspect if we ever unravel it,
01:05:09 it will turn out to be less than we thought in a way.
01:05:13 And perhaps your very own exceptionalist assertion
01:05:17 earlier on in our conversation
01:05:19 that consciousness is something belongs to us humans,
01:05:23 or not humans, but living organisms,
01:05:25 maybe you will one day find out
01:05:27 that consciousness is in everything.
01:05:30 And that will humble you.
01:05:32 If that was true, it would certainly humble me,
01:05:35 although maybe, almost maybe, I don’t know.
01:05:39 I don’t know what effect that would have.
01:05:45 My understanding of that principle is along the lines of,
01:05:48 say, that an electron has a preferred state,
01:05:52 or it may or may not pass through a bit of glass.
01:05:56 It may reflect off, or it may go through,
01:05:58 or something like that.
01:05:59 And so that feels as if a choice has been made.
01:06:07 But if I’m going down the fully deterministic route,
01:06:10 I would say there’s just an underlying determinism
01:06:13 that has defined that,
01:06:14 that has defined the preferred state,
01:06:16 or the reflection or non reflection.
01:06:18 But look, yeah, you’re right.
01:06:19 If it turned out that there was a thing
01:06:22 that it was like to be the sun,
01:06:23 then I’d be amazed and humbled,
01:06:27 and I’d be happy to be both, that sounds pretty cool.
01:06:30 And you’ll say the same thing as you said to your daughter,
01:06:32 but it’s nevertheless feels something like to be me,
01:06:35 and that’s pretty damn good.
01:06:39 So Kubrick created many masterpieces,
01:06:42 including The Shining, Dr. Strangelove, Clockwork Orange.
01:06:46 But to me, he will be remembered, I think,
01:06:48 to many 100 years from now for 2001 in Space Odyssey.
01:06:53 I would say that’s his greatest film.
01:06:54 I agree.
01:06:55 And you are incredibly humble.
01:07:00 I listened to a bunch of your interviews,
01:07:02 and I really appreciate that you’re humble
01:07:04 in your creative efforts and your work.
01:07:07 But if I were to force you a gunpoint.
01:07:11 Do you have a gun?
01:07:13 You don’t know that, the mystery.
01:07:16 It’s to imagine 100 years out into the future.
01:07:20 What will Alex Carlin be remembered for
01:07:23 from something you’ve created already,
01:07:25 or feel you may feel somewhere deep inside
01:07:28 you may still create?
01:07:30 Well, okay, well, I’ll take the question in the spirit
01:07:33 it was asked, but very generous.
01:07:36 Gunpoint.
01:07:37 Yeah.
01:07:42 What I try to do, so therefore what I hope,
01:07:48 yeah, if I’m remembered, what I might be remembered for,
01:07:50 is as someone who participates in a conversation.
01:07:55 And I think that often what happens
01:07:58 is people don’t participate in conversations,
01:08:00 they make proclamations, they make statements,
01:08:04 and people can either react against the statement
01:08:06 or can fall in line behind it.
01:08:08 And I don’t like that.
01:08:10 So I want to be part of a conversation.
01:08:13 I take as a sort of basic principle,
01:08:15 I think I take lots of my cues from science,
01:08:17 but one of the best ones, it seems to me,
01:08:19 is that when a scientist has something proved wrong,
01:08:22 that they previously believed in,
01:08:24 they then have to abandon that position.
01:08:26 So I’d like to be someone who is allied
01:08:28 to that sort of thinking.
01:08:30 So part of an exchange of ideas.
01:08:34 And the exchange of ideas for me is something like,
01:08:38 people in your world, show me things
01:08:40 about how the world works.
01:08:42 And then I say, this is how I feel
01:08:44 about what you’ve told me.
01:08:46 And then other people can react to that.
01:08:47 And it’s not to say this is how the world is.
01:08:52 It’s just to say, it is interesting
01:08:54 to think about the world in this way.
01:08:56 And the conversation is one of the things
01:08:59 I’m really hopeful about in your works.
01:09:02 The conversation you’re having is with the viewer,
01:09:05 in the sense that you’re bringing back
01:09:10 you and several others, but you very much so,
01:09:13 sort of intellectual depth to cinema, to now series,
01:09:21 sort of allowing film to be something that,
01:09:26 yeah, sparks a conversation, is a conversation,
01:09:29 lets people think, allows them to think.
01:09:32 But also, it’s very important for me
01:09:35 that if that conversation is gonna be a good conversation,
01:09:38 what that must involve is that someone like you
01:09:42 who understands AI, and I imagine understands a lot
01:09:45 about quantum mechanics, if they then watch the narrative,
01:09:48 feels, yes, this is a fair account.
01:09:52 So it is a worthy addition to the conversation.
01:09:55 That for me is hugely important.
01:09:57 I’m not interested in getting that stuff wrong.
01:09:59 I’m only interested in trying to get it right.
01:10:04 Alex, it was truly an honor to talk to you.
01:10:06 I really appreciate it.
01:10:07 I really enjoy it.
01:10:08 Thank you so much.
01:10:08 Thank you.
01:10:09 Thanks, man.
01:10:10 Thanks for listening to this conversation
01:10:13 with Alex Garland, and thank you
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01:10:36 on Twitter, at Lex Friedman.
01:10:38 And now, let me leave you with a question from Ava,
01:10:43 the central artificial intelligence character
01:10:45 in the movie Ex Machina, that she asked
01:10:48 during her Turing test.
01:10:51 What will happen to me if I fail your test?
01:10:54 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.