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- [00:02]
Lex Fridman
Joe Rogan Podcast.
- [00:03]
Joe Rogan
Check it out.
- [00:04]
Lex Fridman
The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
- [00:13]
Joe Rogan
It's great to see you again.
- [00:14]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, good to see you.
- [00:17]
Joe Rogan
So since the last time we talked, we spent a lot of time where you were trying to explain to me simulation theory and why the probability of simulation theory is more likely than it not being a simulation.
- [00:33]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it was what, five years ago or something?
- [00:35]
Joe Rogan
I think it was six. Six, Five or six.
- [00:36]
Lex Fridman
Somewhere along those lines. I mean a lot of things happened in the world since then.
- [00:40]
Joe Rogan
Yes, yes, a lot of things. I mean, for example, back then I think we did we even talk about AI?
- [00:48]
Lex Fridman
It probably came up a bit, but
- [00:50]
Joe Rogan
it's like it wasn't, it wasn't this thing looming over civilization. Which is really kind of fascinating when you think about the fact that it's only been six years. And in six years like what a massive jump in some new technology in our life. Like just sort of like the Internet where it like crept up on us. We just accepted that it's a thing, but that the, this, this thing has gotten massively entangled in every aspect of society and every aspect of people's lives in a very short period of time.
- [01:24]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean things are like so much is happening now that is kind of a full time job just to monitor the situation.
- [01:32]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And one of the things that you're talking about is the positive aspects of it, Right. You're talking about like that this is probably going to be a net good for humanity hopefully.
- [01:46]
Lex Fridman
I mean, I think I take both cases seriously. The of the risk side and the big unlock. If we get things right.
- [01:56]
Joe Rogan
I feel like we have the potential like we're on a whitewater raft. We have the potential to get to our destination, but we also have the potential to flip over and try to figure out how to get to shore in freezing cold water and sort of rebuild.
- [02:11]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that seems about right. Yeah. And yeah, and it seems like it's kind of speeding up a bit as well. Right. If you're sort of in this field there is like every few weeks there's a new model being released or something.
- [02:26]
Joe Rogan
Yes.
- [02:26]
Lex Fridman
I guess it's like if you imagine, I guess commentating some fight, right, that's been recorded and you're supposed to do the voiceover and the first round is like normal speed and then the second round is 2x and then the third round 4x and it's just like a whir of legs and arms.
- [02:43]
Joe Rogan
That's a great way to describe it. Yeah, it's just so strange how quickly it snuck up on us in that there's two narratives that we hear. The one narrative is we're in real trouble and that this thing is going to take over every aspect of society, and it's essentially going to be a superior life force, a superior intellect that exists amongst us that we created. And we don't think that's wise. And then there's the other side that. That is saying things like what Elon says, where he's saying, we're going to have universal high income. It's gonna be so much prosperity that no one's ever gonna have to toil again. There'll be no more Third world countries. There'll be no more poverty. Like, we can eradicate poverty with the resources that we have on Earth, and we can change what it means to have to work just to provide yourself with food and housing. That's all gonna be easy and free. And then everything else is going to be. You have to find a purpose in your life is. And I love Elon, but the people who have that perspective are all making money off AI. They are all invested, like, heavily. Marc Andreessen all these people that have this rosy view of it, they're all invested heavily into it. So when someone like you, who's not necessarily in that camp, you know, that is more of a true objective analyst of what's going on. When you have a positive aspect or a positive viewpoint of it, I get a little more excited.
- [04:14]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, well, I mean, the truth is, we don't know how it will pan out. So, I mean, I think there are these scenarios where we unlock this enormous boost both to economic productivity, but then across medicine, entertainment, environment, travel, all kinds of things. And like a tsunami of wealth just kind of flows through and lifts all boats. And then the idea of human work becomes an anachronism where you have machines that can do everything that we can do physically and mentally and do it much better and cheaper. And so I think in those scenarios where this really works, the transformation is a lot deeper. So that kind of layers to the onion. So the most superficial level is, well, they automate their job. So what are people gonna. What are they gonna do for how they're gonna work? Well, that comes a little bit deeper first. Like, the most superficial level is people just wonder, where will I get the job if the robot replaces me? And then the superficial level of that conversation, I think, is, well, you need to retrain workers so they can work in other fields. And maybe there needs to be I don't know, employment insurance whilst they are being retrained or something like that. But once you think through where this ultimately leads, you think it's not just a few jobs, I think, but it's really everything that humans can do to a good approximation. With maybe the exception being where the consumer has a direct preference that the particular product or service be done by human. Like priest, prostitute and politician. Three Ps, those might survive.
- [05:57]
Joe Rogan
Well, politician, hopefully not. Hopefully AI can handle that all without any corruption.
- [06:03]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, but somebody's got to take credit for it.
- [06:05]
Joe Rogan
This is true. Encode it. Yeah.
- [06:11]
Lex Fridman
And so then you get to these more profound questions, I think, about meaning and purpose and like, what does a human life look like at technological maturity?
- [06:21]
Joe Rogan
Right. Also, what is experience? Does experience have to be measurable? Like do you have to touch it? Do you have to measure it and weigh it? Or is virtual experience still experience? Like if you have a very full and enjoyable and fulfilling virtual life, is that enough? You know what I mean? Like, do you have to do everything in the material world or can you find happiness in a virtual world that doesn't currently exist? But we could clearly see the. If it expands, there's going to be the possibility of experiencing a matrix type reality.
- [07:07]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I think I see where you're going, but yeah, I mean, I think like different strokes for different folks. If you imagine a world where presumably these virtual worlds will be very rich and deep and fascinating, but some people might just like the idea of, you know, climbing the real Mount Everest rather than, you know, being in.
- [07:27]
Joe Rogan
Most certainly, but however there, there could come a time where people are locked out of regular reality. Like this is worst case scenario with AI is that you, you, you have your needs taken care of, but there is no purpose. There's nothing to do. There's nothing to do because AI is taking care of all aspects of society other than recreation. There's nothing to do. And then this one recreation comes along that's not reality, but it's way more fulfilling and exciting than any other as reality. And you know, an example of that would just be in a very minor way. Your phone provides you with that sort of an escape and it's not even that thrilling and yet it's massively addicting. Your phone. People are on their phone six hours a day. If you, if we come up with a virtual reality that's way more exciting than regular reality, everyone's going to hop on in.
- [08:24]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean, I think to some extent this will maybe be the case. Whether you go the virtual path or the physical path. I mean, you could imagine a future where there are resorts and people are sort of lying in beach chairs sipping drinks all day long. And that's also a kind of checking out, right?
- [08:42]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, well, that, yeah, that's not fulfilling. The thing about a virtual reality is you don't have to even live within our physics. I mean, you can fly, you can do anything.
- [08:54]
Lex Fridman
It's a larger space of possibilities. But either way, it could be like a passive existence in physical reality where you're like launching at the beach, or it could be like a video game. In video games, like you could have like really intense every straining every fiber to try to succeed in this virtual environment. Or like one where you're just kind of floating on some cloud in a drug like state.
- [09:13]
Joe Rogan
But I don't think people are going to be interested in that because just the way the human mind works, like what kind of video games are people attracted to? It's because a video game is essentially it's an approximation of that. You're just watching it on a screen, but you're sort of forgetting the fact that you're watching it on a screen. You're just concentrating on this 3D reality that you're running through with a machine gun or whatever you're doing. Right. That's what people are interested in. They're not interested in these games. We just like float over the earth and like fly and just eat bananas. No, they're interested in thrilling things. And if that gets provided in a virtual way, the amount of people that are going to just say this is better than regular boring life or we're a slave to a computer.
- [09:59]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean there are, there are both kinds.
- [10:02]
Joe Rogan
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- [10:58]
Lex Fridman
Oh yeah, I was just saying that there are also these computer games that like provide a more passive experience. You're like not really doing much and it's more kind of zoning out.
- [11:07]
Joe Rogan
But most people aren't interested in those. Most people are interested in Call of Duty. They're interested in these wild first person shooters where you're running down hallways and everything's exciting and thrilling, or some sci fi game or you know, Half Life, something like that. That's what people are interested in.
- [11:23]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, well, I mean, I. I think there are like some personality differences in what path you would take there, but either way, I think a lot of the choices that people would make currently depend on what they are sort of designed to respond to by feeling good about it. So like, if you enjoy one thing, you choose that. If you enjoy another. Not in this condition of technological maturity. If we imagine sort of a future civilization that has developed all possible technologies to their maximum, then amongst the affordances, amongst the things they could do is like they wouldn't just have control over the external environment, things around them, but also their own biology and brains. So if you were one of these people and like maybe right now the only way you get enjoyment is by getting crazy drunk or doing sort of things you don't really approve of. Maybe, but that's actually what sort of lights your fire. You could imagine redesigning yourself to take the same kind of pleasure, but in some kind of contemplating the beauty of the universe or appreciating the goodness in the heart of others, or some more sort of noble aspiration like solving abstract mathematics rather than playing first person shooters. You would have it like whether you would get your thrills from one kind of activity or the other.
- [12:50]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Which brings us to the question, like, what does it mean to be human? Like for people finding beauty and joy in interesting and fascinating things and how to be a better person and all the different aspects of human life that we think about when we think about people and we think about noble aspects of humanity. But doesn't that have to exist in conjunction with the worst aspects of society for us to appreciate it? It seems like this is a part of the human condition, is that we have to have crime so that we can appreciate peace. We have to have war so we could appreciate peace. We have to have hate so we could appreciate love. And we're never without one or the other. They're always both together in constant conflict. And we're always nobly hoping that the good wins out over the bad. And this is part of the struggle of being a human being. And if we just completely eliminate that struggle, we're going to have to find some. We're going to have to be a different thing. Because what we are is this very strange territorial primate who's endlessly curious. And this territorial primate is moving in a certain direction. And that direction seems to be a better society. Seems to be over time. If you look at statistics from thousands of years ago to today, there's less violence, there's better medicine, there's better education. It's moving in a better and better and better direction, but it's in a struggle. That's part of why it moves. If all of a sudden there's no struggle and everyone is this wonderful enlightened being, like, what are we? Because we're going to be a different thing than what we are right now. And if you love music and if you love art and if you love, you know, novels and all these different things that come out of the human condition, well, what. Those things come out of struggle, Those things come out of confusion and pain and heartbreak and love and joy and all that stuff all piled up together without that, like, what are we? And so if we are moving in this direction technologically and we're not moving as fast biologically, do we merge? Because that seems to be what I think. I think that if this thing goes the way it continues to go, the bottleneck is going to be human biology.
- [15:17]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah. There is a kind of paradox embedded in our efforts to make progress. So, like, there are all these kind of scientists and people working to develop better technologies and throughout the economy, in some company, maybe you try to figure out how to make some process a little bit more efficient so you can serve customers better. And all of designed to solve problems. Right. If you sort of extrapolate that to its logical endpoint. Right. You would imagine we would have perfect technology that can do everything, solve all the problems, presumably with AI and automation.
- [15:52]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [15:54]
Lex Fridman
But then you end up in this condition where there is kind of nothing left for us to do, you might think. And so although it looks like we have these strong reasons to push forward in this direction, if you actually look at the end point, if we succeeded too many people, it will look kind of unpalatable and like this kind of future where all the problems are solved, nevertheless, that does seem to be the direction that we are headed in. Probably the direction that we should be heading.
- [16:23]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Wouldn't that be a Better goal if there was zero murder, zero violence, zero crime, zero lying, zero corruption, and human beings all worked in coordination with each other, just like in a sense of unique sinking and harmony.
- [16:41]
Lex Fridman
Right.
- [16:42]
Joe Rogan
That would be way better.
- [16:44]
Lex Fridman
But it does. Like, if you actually stare at that situation, it does have these slightly unpalatable qualities. Because you might think it looks kind of bland then, right?
- [16:55]
Joe Rogan
If it's not necessarily though, it's just. It looks bland. If you think about what we're experiencing now, like all the excitement and the weirdness of uncertainty and of not knowing, you know, and. And also the negative aspects of our life in conjunction with the positive aspects of our lives. We contrast the two of them and you really appreciate good people after around a bunch of fucking assholes, you know, if that doesn't. But it doesn't have to be that way. This is just what we are dealing with. This is my position on work too, because everybody in their head is like, what happens when AI takes all the jobs? And I'm like, do you have to have a fucking job? Isn't that a human invention? Like, why do you have to have a job? It seems crazy that our main focus is on housing and food, and most people are basically just working for that. Most people that are struggling check to check. Basically, housing and food is their daily labor. If that's removed, wouldn't enough people figure out what to do with their time?
- [18:02]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I think so. There will be some transition and discomfort in change. But this is made up ultimately. That is like. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like. So slavery is really bad, right? Like, wage labor is a sort of, you know, slavery light, in a sense. You have to sell a third of your working day just to get money to. To pay for necessities.
- [18:24]
Joe Rogan
And the people that are trying to make the most money make the conditions for their employees as shitty as possible because it costs the least amount. They don't think about it, like, listen, maybe we make less money, but we have an awesome experience for everybody that works there. Nobody thinks like that. They all think, like, we have to make the most money because we have shareholders and we have a responsibility and these people need to make more money every quarter. So.
- [18:47]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Although sometimes you do need to compete for talent.
- [18:49]
Joe Rogan
That's true too. But only the top talent. That's why the CEOs get all the bread and all the people on the assembly line get fired.
- [18:56]
Lex Fridman
Some employees get treated well.
- [18:57]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [18:57]
Lex Fridman
What would you say?
- [18:58]
Joe Rogan
I mean, Jamie is a different kind of employee. Jamie is literally the co.
- [19:03]
Lex Fridman
Exactly.
- [19:04]
Joe Rogan
I mean, he's the co person on the show. Yeah, yeah, that's different. But you know, some dude who's out there, you know, stocking boxes for Amazon, that's different than being the CEO.
- [19:14]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So I mean, I think like, ultimately that would be a huge liberation and kind of restore dignity. Like you should be in control of your own time. It's kind of almost the most like, aside from your own body, like your own time, your own attention.
- [19:28]
Joe Rogan
But we have to teach people discipline. They have to. That's the thing is like, if you give people the opportunity to just do nothing. We do, you know, we're primates, we'll find a way to. We're genetically sort of designed to conserve resources. You don't want to overuse resources for no reason. Do a bunch of shit because you won't survive. You don't have enough food. So we're sort of designed to like, know how to be lazy. And so we're going to have to find things that give us purpose or we'll get depressed. This episode is brought to you by Visible. It's officially summer folks and boy, what a summer we are having. It feels like one of those good old fashioned summers. We just want to enjoy every moment and keep up with the action. Your best companion this summer, Visible Wireless. Visible gives you unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. So you can make this the summer of fun and savings. Visible is more than just a wireless plan. It's unlimited wireless designed to always keep you connected with no contract to tie you down. Switch today@visible.com plan start at $25 a month or get our premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code Rogan terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details.
- [20:51]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean, so it used to be the traditional idea like a British aristocracy like that you wouldn't have to work for a living. It was kind of an unfortunate necessity for many people that they had to work for their daily bread. Right. But the ideal way of being human was that you just had money and then you spent your time doing other things. Like, you know, maybe you were involved in politics or maybe you had like an art collection or you did your gardening or entertain friends.
- [21:18]
Joe Rogan
That's the best aspect of it. But when you think about British aristocracy, don't you think about fuck ups? I do. I think about guys that are just drunk, they drive their Ferrari into a lake and they accidentally drown their friend. And then they pay off the cops and they get away with it. That's what I think of.
- [21:34]
Lex Fridman
Well, yeah, there's that, but there were also these kind of, I don't know, amateur scientists or eccentrics who had their weird thing and it kind of added to. So I guess it brings out, like, the more freedom somebody has, the more they can reveal their true nature.
- [21:47]
Joe Rogan
Well, it also depends on how they're rich raised.
- [21:49]
Lex Fridman
Right.
- [21:51]
Joe Rogan
Who are their parents? What values did they instill in them when they were young? Did they explain the value of hard work that's actually good for you? And then if you just find something you really want to do and you concentrate on it and really work hard at it, it's actually very fulfilling.
- [22:06]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So you could imagine, for example, the education system in this world where we no longer need to work. Presumably it would need to be redesigned from. From scratch, basically. Because right now it's a kind of machine. Right. So you take children coming in kind of on a conveyor belt and then some processing is done, like sit at their desk. Here is this assignment, here is a grid. And then they come out with a quality label attached.
- [22:30]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, right.
- [22:31]
Lex Fridman
And then they are meant to be productive workers that you could put in an office and they will. So this kind of is an unfortunate fact about the current condition that. I mean, the world needs a lot of these office workers that can do all these tasks in the economy. So, like, it's. We have to have.
- [22:47]
Joe Rogan
Until it doesn't.
- [22:48]
Lex Fridman
Until it doesn't. And at that point it would be absurd to keep doing this. Right. Then you could imagine changing education so that it would be much more about, like, how can you learn to live well, a life of leisure like you imagine.
- [23:05]
Joe Rogan
You're right.
- [23:06]
Lex Fridman
Cultivating, like, you know, the art of conversation, appreciation for art and music, hobbies, physical wellness, like nature, the ability to set your own goals and take your own initiatives to, you know, to develop true friendships with people. Like these are things are not taught in school. But you could imagine that being the curriculum, like spirituality, like all kinds of things that would then equip people to sort of use their freedom, their wealth, their free time for some kind of actually meaningful and beautiful activities.
- [23:44]
Joe Rogan
For sure. Preemptively, we should be kind of teaching people like that now. Like, if young people are coming up now, the world that they're. If you're in first grade right now, 12 years from now, when you're graduating from high school, the world is a totally different place. And this idea that being a productive worker who could sit still, for eight hours a day, that's the best way we should teach kids. That seems crazy if we're really, like, seeing the world that you're describing and that most people seem to think is oncoming.
- [24:14]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Yeah. I guess that the timeline is still a little bit uncertain. So you don't end up in a situation right. Where you sort of. Now you find yourself, you're 20 years old, it's time to go out in the world, you have no skills. The AI revolution hasn't yet quite happened. It's kind of.
- [24:29]
Joe Rogan
Well, isn't that a liberal arts degree anyway?
- [24:31]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And it's highly static.
- [24:33]
Joe Rogan
There's a lot of silly degrees that people get right now that are useless anyway, and they spend a tremendous amount of time working on getting it. And then when they get it out, there's no jobs for that degree.
- [24:45]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So they were a little bit too early, maybe in hopping on this.
- [24:48]
Joe Rogan
Maybe. Or, you know, there's also traps. There's. There's things that you can get really excited about and do. Like if you want to play professional bowling, you want to bowl professionally. Like. Well, the amount of money you're going to make is very limited because the best bowler in the world, like, what is the best bowler, professional bowler in the world make? Let's guess. I say.
- [25:09]
Lex Fridman
I didn't know that.
- [25:10]
Joe Rogan
$1,000. Yes. Professional Bowers. We used to know a guy. Ari's friends with a guy, Tommy. God, I can't remember his last name. Do you remember his last name? Jamie? He was a professional bowler, but he used to come to the Comedy Store and hang out. Really nice guy and love comedy.
- [25:26]
Lex Fridman
I'd imagine, like, maybe the very best one makes a pretty decent living. And then the third best, like, it's just.
- [25:32]
Joe Rogan
I bet barely.
- [25:32]
Lex Fridman
Barely.
- [25:33]
Joe Rogan
I bet the best guy probably makes maybe 100 grand or 200 grand at the most. And that means, like the 30th guy in the world is nothing. Yeah. There you have to have another job to pursue that.
- [25:44]
Lex Fridman
Well, but then in. In this.
- [25:46]
Joe Rogan
What does he make? Oh, 200k. Oh, 400k in big season. 450, including prize money and sponsorships. But then, like, what does EJ Tuckett made? 430. Yeah. EJ. EJ Tackett made 437,540 for the 2025 season with several others between 190k and 270k in prize money alone. Top tier. So the top tier guys make a good living, but how many guys are there? You know what I'm saying?
- [26:17]
Lex Fridman
It's probably like a very thin sort of peak.
- [26:20]
Joe Rogan
So if you choose to go into bowling, it's not like choosing to go into. You know, there's a lot of other jobs. Like, even if you want to be a basketball player, they're making a lot of money. You know, if you're a really good basketball player and you pursue that, like, you could get very, very rich. But how many of them get rich?
- [26:36]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, but then, like, so maybe. Maybe the money factor would kind of drop out of the picture.
- [26:40]
Joe Rogan
Yes. And it would just be what you're interested in, and then maybe even it would. I mean, the opportunities are endless and
- [26:47]
Lex Fridman
what other people are interested in to some extent, because, like, I think part of what people are competing for is also prestige and status.
- [26:54]
Joe Rogan
That would be a thing. Right. Like, status would be more important. It's like, who's the best at this thing? Like. Like a bunch of friends who play golf, like Jamie plays golf all the time. Golfers are all, like, comparing each other's scores, and they're all. They're playing. They're competing in this game, and they think about that more than they think about work. Like, people who love golf, they fucking hate work. Like, I used to say that about comedy back when I first started. One of the things that I noticed is the guys who really got into golf, their careers kind of stalled because they were more excited about playing golf than they were about writing jokes and going on the road. And I was like, okay, so if the average person doesn't need food and housing anymore from labor, if that's gone, and now you just get it, and so now you could just go do things. We just have to teach people to be excited about stuff. We have to teach people the value of curiosity and finding things that are interesting to you, and then the value of just education for the sake of learning things, because it's interesting. Just. Just pure satisfaction of curiosity, which is a beautiful thing. Like, that would be great for everybody if we. Instead of learning things because your teacher tells you you have to learn it well, there's always going to be people that just naturally gravitate towards mathematics, and they're really fascinated by mathematics. And there's always going to be people that are just naturally gravitating towards history. They're like, how did we get here? What is this? How did it start? Who wrote that? Who's the first guy to figure that out? And that's. You're going to naturally go towards that and just be educated for the sake of satisfying your curiosity. And maybe we'll have a more balanced society because people will actually be able to just pursue their interests, but we have to teach them to do it. That's what I think is going to be really important about young people in the future. Teach them to actually pursue their curiosity rather than just squash any desires they have for novelty and for interesting things and just be able to work all day doing something you hate. Because that's what it means to be an adult.
- [28:57]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I think, like, cultivating that would be like the way forward in this case. Right.
- [29:03]
Joe Rogan
And seems very possible. It's doable.
- [29:06]
Lex Fridman
Like, we know curious people, at least to some extent. I think there's probably also some differences in how different folks are wired. Like, some people get bored very easily. Others find everything fascinating. Some people are, like, just naturally depressed or have low mood. Others are sort of evolving.
- [29:22]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, but those people that are naturally depressed, how much would their life change if they were coached at a very early age the value of exercise? And if they started running, if they started doing yoga and they started feeling much better and they weren't naturally depressed anymore, and then you change their diet and you start adding in vitamins and nutrients and stop giving them processed foods and all of a sudden they feel better. Because the concept even of depression, like, what does that mean? Well, it varies so wildly. And when you're talking about people that aren't taking care of their bodies and that's not thought of as a primary factor and why depression exists in the first place. Well, this is a very unscientific approach then, because we know that it has a profound impact on human beings. So we're pretending that there's like this one size fit all. No, I think that should be also a part of teaching people how to be a human being. Chase your curiosities. But also this is why you're not feeling well. And that if you just develop this ability to get some momentum going and just show up at that yoga class every day, you'll feel way better and you don't have to take a pill.
- [30:26]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I think many could be a lot improved if they were taught to sort of take care of their basic physiology.
- [30:35]
Joe Rogan
Everyone can be improved. 100% of them can be improved. It's a part of being a human being.
- [30:40]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think there is also some people who might just have some imbalance of some neurotransmitter because of some genetic 100%, or maybe they don't even have the energy to engage in these activities that would make them feel Better. But then I think that would be much better medicines for helping.
- [30:58]
Joe Rogan
That's where Adderall comes in. Let's go give them some Adderall.
- [31:02]
Lex Fridman
Well, get him fired up.
- [31:04]
Joe Rogan
Get him start running. I'm kidding. But what we're saying is all doable. We're not asking people to breathe underwater. Right. We're saying is that there are people on earth that live like that. And this idea that living just for a paycheck so that you can cover your food and your housing, which we've always thought of as being just an undeniable part of being a person, an adult, this is what you have to do. You have to pay for your food, pay for your housing. But if we do get to a point where the structure of society is now run by hyper intelligent artificial intelligence, you wouldn't need most jobs that people have to do that suck in order to get our society to this point. If you wanted an iPhone, you needed some people that were in a factory somewhere putting it all together. You needed someone who's designing it. You needed someone who's sitting there in the office trying to figure out how to market it. You needed all those jobs. But when we don't need all those jobs anymore, then things are going to be very interesting. And that's what I'm saying. We need to become a different thing. It's kind of true and kind of not. You can be a human being and live in that world, but we're going to have to re educate people how to be a human being. It's going to. Our education system specifically in this country is just designed to make factory workers specifically. Like there's a real history of it. We know why they made it this way. They made it this way. And they got people in really early so they could get people set up for jobs. They just want people to work.
- [32:42]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So we are kind of currently ill suited for really thriving in an environment of abundance and for enjoying life. Because both at deep biological timescales and during the lifespan of a single individual, there are all these pressures, necessities that kind of force us to become a certain type. I mean, we talked about the education system training people to be the kind who can sit at the desk all day long and perform tasks biologically. We've evolved drives to be lazy, to conserve energy, to eat as much as we can. And now in the modern environment where there are fridges everywhere, it causes problems metabolically and in terms of enjoying life for many people, there is this hedonic treadmill. So you achieve Something, some improvement. There is a spike of happiness. And then you sort of go back to baseline very quickly. You start to take for granted all the blessings of life, which makes it very difficult to actually achieve a state of permanent happiness and felicity. And it's kind of been necessary because there needed to be this motivation to keep striving for the next thing. Now, once you've actually achieved all the things, then maybe that becomes kind of dysfunctional. Why keep wanting to strive for the next thing if all the things have already been achieved, at least in a certain domain? And so I think as we move deeper into this hypothesized future where we get all these magical technologies, then at some point, probably some transformation of human nature would have to go along with that. First, maybe cultural changes to equip people for a life of leisure.
- [34:34]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [34:35]
Lex Fridman
And then ultimately maybe more profound changes to our very biology. And so that. Imagine if you solve aging and you can now live for thousands of years. Right. Like, maybe the way our memory work is not really set up for the. Maybe we would just go stale after 200 years with our current brains. Like, we just get stuck in a rut. We don't know, because we haven't lived for 200 years. But that could easily turn out to be the case with a human. So then maybe at that point you would need to sort of do something to sort of add more cognitive resources, more flexibility, do some sort of psychedelic reset or something to sort of keep the flexibility going for longer periods of time.
- [35:13]
Joe Rogan
I'm glad you said a psychedelic reset, because it would be very funny if the main tools that we have for navigating this are all illegal, because I think they might be. And specifically with psilocybin and DMT and probably ibogaine as well. Like, if we wanted chemical tools to navigate a new reality, those are probably the best ones that we have available, and they're all illegal. And I think you're right. I think if we're going to be able to navigate this correctly, we have to kind of change the way we interact with each other, what it means to be a person. But I wonder how much of the conflict that we have is a direct result of this inherent struggle that so many people have. And there's a direct correlation between extreme poverty and extreme crime. You know, specifically in this country. If you look at the areas of extreme poverty in this country, there are also the areas with extreme crime. And I wonder how much of that would be completely alleviated with a complete lack of poverty. You know, we've Always assumed that if you're going to have a functioning society that you're going to have slums. Why? Like why they don't serve any function. It's not a good thing. Well. Well, it's because some people are always going to be making bad decisions and some people are always going to be going down the wrong road. And crime and this and that. Right. But they're still just humans. And some humans don't do that. So wouldn't it be better to figure out a way to not have humans ever do that anymore? And that seems like a way to. There seems like a way to do that. It's again, not asking people to breathe underwater. We're just. We're trying to figure out why do some people never engage in crime. Why do some people live these really fulfilling and interesting lives? Probably because they were exposed to it when they were really young. Probably because they weren't exposed to like very bad environments and very bad crime and very bad poverty. And how much of that would change if there was no more poverty? It sounds like such a little fairytale, childlike, oh, one day we'll have no poverty. But that's doable if everyone is alive. Right? Okay, that's alive right now. Is not starving to death. That means we figured out a way to at least, the very least get you resources so you could feed yourself. Right. No matter how dysfunctional things are, all that has to do is get ramped up a few steps.
- [37:38]
Lex Fridman
I am.
- [37:39]
Joe Rogan
And now you have. No one ever worried about being fed. No one ever worrying about not having a place to sleep. Sleep. And then you have to find purpose. But it seems like there's a lot of people that find purpose without having a financial price tag attached to it. Just by what we're talking about with golf. Or you could be like really into writing books. You could write books all day long. And people are always going to want human created fiction. People are always going to be interested in the way other people think about things. You'll find there's plenty of things to do. There's plenty of games to play and plenty of skills to learn. The idea that the only reason why we work is to eat and to not get rained on seems nuts.
- [38:23]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it is, I guess to some extent an open question to what extent people will always want to read human fiction or to prefer the human generated outputs. It might be just because current AI generated writing is kind of lacking in various ways. It's often slop and boring. But if it became really good, then maybe it would just Be much more fun. Like if a movie made by an AI might just be so much better and richer and the lighting is perfect and the dialogue is sharp and it's more funny and deep and certainly touches it. Then you go and watch this human produced thing and it's going like. Like most people don't go and watch sort of film school students productions, right?
- [39:11]
Joe Rogan
But then there's that like that movie obsession. Wasn't that movie made like very inexpensively? And it's a huge hit, right? And that's part of the thrill of it, is that this guy who was like a YouTuber, right, who created this film, and now this movie's a giant hit and everybody's like super excited about it. Now that same movie was made by AI. I wonder if it would have that impact because it doesn't have the human connection.
- [39:37]
Lex Fridman
So that's possible that we keep getting interested in these things because we sort of are really entangled with the human world much more than we are with the world of AIs. And I mean, for the same reason you might be more interested in if like your brother or friend did something, you might think, oh, this is interesting, I want to check that out. Or it was some random dude who made something slightly better. It doesn't mean.
- [40:02]
Joe Rogan
Right when you go to see your nephew play baseball, you wouldn't really go see little kids baseball.
- [40:07]
Lex Fridman
No, no, just randomly, right when your
- [40:09]
Joe Rogan
nephew gets on first base, like, way to go, Bobby.
- [40:12]
Lex Fridman
So I think these kind of social entanglements that we have will be a big part of what gives structure to lives in this condition where like, the external constraints are removed.
- [40:26]
Joe Rogan
I think that there is a great value for the human mind, for whatever reason, in getting better at things and learning things. And I think that if we could instill that in people at a young age, I think it would be fairly easy to get people to pursue that path. But we have to completely revamp our education system, which should have been done a long time ago anyway. The idea of having unenthusiastic, underpaid people being any percentage of what children encounter for most of the day when they're in their most formative period is insane. It should be a rich, exciting, enthusiastic journey and how to be a better person and how it's exciting to learn things and how it's exciting to get better at things and about how anybody can get better at things.
- [41:15]
Lex Fridman
I mean, I hate that every day of school.
- [41:17]
Joe Rogan
I hated it, Hated it. I didn't even know that I was interested in learning anything until I Got out of school.
- [41:23]
Lex Fridman
The same for me. I mean, I only discovered, like, I also hated books and everything like that for my first 15 years of life, because I associated that with school. That was the kind of school thing. So it's only then randomly, one day I happened to walk into the local library for no reason and pulled out a book here and there. And then I discovered that there was this whole world of science and idea and literature and all of that, like, very different from what we were doing in school. And then that kind of opened. Opened the gates for me to this.
- [41:51]
Joe Rogan
Imagine what a head start you would have had if you had, like, a different kind of education with super enthusiastic people who really love teaching children, are really good at it, and that we reward them, and that it becomes a very prestigious position to be in, rather than what it is now. If you talk to some guy and he goes, oh, I'm a high school teacher, you're like, oh, poor bastard. How does he feed himself? That's immediately what I think. Like, good for you that you're doing that. But also, I guarantee you could probably be making a lot more money and be happier doing another job. And so that's a terrible way to start life off. And if we just revamp that, then you have a bunch of people that are interacting with life in a very different way. And instead of being thought, I have to get a job someday, I have to get a job after school anyway to help my mom pay the bills because we're struggling. So I got to contribute to the household. Even though I'm 16, I can't hang out with friends if all that stuff's out the window. And now it's like, no, what we need to find out is what is exciting for you? Like what. What excites your mind, your specific personality? What is it about life that's interesting? And let's expose you to a bunch of different things that are exciting and interesting that other people find value in. And let's find out which way you gravitate, because maybe you gravitate towards chess, or maybe you gravitate towards something completely different. Maybe you're just really in a painting. Maybe painting just lights you up and you look at a canvas and you just start fucking around with it. And that's your thing. There's a lot of people in this world that find that. It's just. They have to find it themselves, unfortunately.
- [43:28]
Lex Fridman
I think that's kind of inspiring, but I think the train doesn't stop there. So if we think even more further into this Kind of condition of technological maturity. I think in addition to sort of freeing up people, making it easy to produce the food and the houses and cars that go faster and don't pollute and all of this stuff, if you think through what maybe a technologically mature civilization could do. So a lot of these learning, for example, is something that gives people purpose, but maybe you would have the ability to sort of download knowledge at the click of a button. So rather than like, if you want to learn advanced mathematics now, you have to study for years, Right. Do books with exercises and apply yourself and then eventually you sort of unlock. Yeah, but like maybe at technological maturity that would be like, okay, understand mathematics. Okay, I'm going to press that button. Boom. Now I'm done. Mathematical.
- [44:28]
Joe Rogan
Like the Matrix. I know Kung Fu, remember?
- [44:30]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So if you had like, you may be some kind of nanobots that could infiltrate your brain and then change the synopsis in just such a way that you are not the same as you were before, except you have these concepts from abstract mathematics after 20 minutes or something like that, some super intelligence works out how to change your synapses to this new condition. And if you were inclined to do various things because they give you joy and pleasure, like you could also think, well, I could do those things and get the joy and pleasure, or I could just push this button that activates the same joy and pleasure. So there would be these shortcuts to everything. And it looks like you would have a post instrumental condition where there would at least at first sight seem to be no reason to do anything for the sake of achieving something else, because there would always be this shorter path to that other thing pressing the button. And so that's a kind of deeper form of redundancy. It seems that all forms of human instrumental effort would become unmotivated. You could still go to the gym every day and sweat for an hour, or you could just take the pill that induces exactly the same physiological effects and the mental effects, like the calm or whatever you feel after.
- [45:52]
Joe Rogan
Or maybe even better genetically engineered or they don't have to take a pill.
- [45:55]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So then I think you're getting more into these fundamental questions of value, philosophical questions about what ultimately is it that makes a life good and what makes
- [46:09]
Joe Rogan
a life good for a primate, because that's what we are, or a primitive version of primates. I think we're going to become something different. And if we do it through technologically induced evolution or biologically induced evolution, we're still moving in a general direction. Just biologically. If you look at ancient hominids and look at us, we're clearly very different. So we're moving in a general direction anyway. And when you look at the grays, like these prototypical aliens that everybody sees with the big heads and skinny bodies, what do they look like? Well, they look like if we keep going, that's what we're going to look like. We're going to be these genderless, sexless muscle, this little skinny things with giant heads that communicate telepathically, which is probably where we're moving. And if we're moving that way, maybe we, you know, we think of them as being an alien from another. Maybe that's not. Maybe that's just the general direction that primates go. Once they figure out technology, they eventually realize, well, all. First of all, the idea of having to have a male and a female is kind of crazy. Why? Well, because we have to reproduce. Well, what if we don't reproduce like that anymore? What if all reproduction is done through engineering? And there's no more. There's no more sex, so there's no more lust, so there's no more jealousy, so there's no more ego, there's no more anything. And then there's a hive mind because technology advanced to the point where the reason why they have these big giant heads, they're essentially locked into everybody, all around them, all the time.
- [47:35]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, well, it's not that what we would want, though.
- [47:39]
Joe Rogan
Not us, but I don't think we'll be us anymore. I think this idea, like, if you went to chimps and you said, hey, dude, one day you're gonna be on a plane eating peanuts, flying over the ocean, they'd be like that. I don't want to do that. I'll just stay here where the fruit is. You guys are nuts. Like, why do you want to do that? And you'll be addicted to Kratom and you'll be watching YouTube all day long, like, no, I don't want to do that. That doesn't sound fun.
- [48:04]
Lex Fridman
We do have a lot of bananas, though.
- [48:06]
Joe Rogan
Maybe you have to get killed by the other chimpanzees that want the bananas. They have chimp wars. They come in and kill each other. So I think we're gonna be something different. And I think that's inevitable anyway. If you believe in evolution. It's inevitable anyway that we become something different. We're not a finished product.
- [48:24]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, no, I think that is true. We are not the finished product. Now the question is, the thing that we become or that becomes is That a result of us choosing how we want to be? Or is it just these kind of impersonal forces like evolution, selecting certain types that might end up leading to outcomes that we actually don't want. And so I guess the hope is that we would be able to develop along a path that preserves and develops the things that we actually value about being human, maybe amplifies them, then maybe adds other things. So there are many different possible things you could develop in the future, but that we sort of select those that actually make us better rather than just randomly different, that we can sort of grow into our ideals.
- [49:17]
Joe Rogan
But it's so funny how much value we put in human condition, how much value we put in meaning, because it is valuable to us. When you think about like what that means in terms of the amount of energy it produces, the amount of impact that it has, versus the structure of the universe itself, versus black holes and stellar nurseries and things that are just infinitely more spectacular than the human condition. But to us it's like, oh, what is meaning? What is meaning? What is meaning to me? Like, well, what is meaning to me? You is you're a finite biological organism that has to find meaning because you're sort of tromping around through this weird world where eventually you're going to die and you're going to leave your mark. And maybe reincarnation is real, maybe the afterlife's real, Nobody fucking knows. So you got to have meaning. But the universe itself, like a human only lives 100 years. How much meaning can you have in a hundred years?
- [50:13]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah, I think we kind of die prematurely. I mean, we think of us as like, first you become stronger and more capable for 15, 20 years. Right. Then biologically you stagnate. And then maybe you keep accumulating sort of knowledge and skills for another few decades. But just as you have started to acquire a modicum of wisdom, like your brain starts to rot.
- [50:38]
Joe Rogan
Yep.
- [50:39]
Lex Fridman
And then everything is erased, either by Alzheimer's or death. And that's all gone. The whole lifetime of experience.
- [50:46]
Joe Rogan
There's your meaning.
- [50:47]
Lex Fridman
All the memories and the hard earned lessons. So that seems kind of sad and probably not the best way for things to be. I think we would want to extend the human lifespan so you could continue to grow up, not just kind of reach 20 and then plateau there for the rest of your life. But what if we could continue to develop so that. But at 80 you were as much stronger and be able to understand more and move better and just have the same capacity increase as you had between 0 and 20. And you just kept going.
- [51:21]
Joe Rogan
Well, these life extension scientists that are working on these things, guys like David Sinclair, they believe that that's not just a possibility, but an inevitability.
- [51:30]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, well, so that's more like, I guess, preserving, preventing or delaying that decay, which is already very good.
- [51:37]
Joe Rogan
Not reversing. They're talking about reversing.
- [51:39]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah, but then you would go back to being 20, right. In terms of biologically.
- [51:44]
Joe Rogan
But then you have engineering, if you
- [51:46]
Lex Fridman
have very long time span, so then you might at some point want to continue to grow. Like you might not want to just be stuck at a 20 year old human for 10,000 years. Like maybe eventually you would want to become like slightly bigger. Like in terms of your ability to engage with the world, of course.
- [52:05]
Joe Rogan
And if they can figure out how to make people. Well, there's already genetic engineering that's being done in terms of increasing potential intelligence and iq. They're already doing that. And so this was, I'm sure you know, about that thing that happened in China where this one doctor got in trouble because he had genetically engineered some babies to be inoculated to hiv. But it also at the same time gave them a far increased potential iq. It remains to be seen whether or not it actually works as these guys, you know, become like 20 and 30 and we start putting them in chess tournaments and see if it really did make them smarter. But if the possibility of that is already being studied, they already understand the differences between like what's possible, what we understand, and that increases every day. They understand more every day. More is possible every day if that just keeps going. Well, you have a different version of what the human consciousness is. You have a different version of the human mind.
- [53:11]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I think the way AI is going, I think that's the train that's going to reach the destination faster.
- [53:19]
Joe Rogan
Oh yeah.
- [53:20]
Lex Fridman
And then once you do have super intelligence in machine substrate, then that can then unlock all kinds of technologies, including these biological technologies or nanotechnology or a host of other things that could then sort of bring us up, if that's how we decide to go and uplift us into different. Like either biologically enhancing us or like uploading us into.
- [53:45]
Joe Rogan
But again, it's that whitewater river raft. It's like we're going down this white water and we might make it out of this or it might crash. You know, one of the weird things about. I'm very fascinated with ancient civilizations. And one of the weirdest things about ancient civilizations is when you go really, really far back a bunch of them have these depictions of kings that ruled for thousands of years. And it's very strange stuff because the Egyptians and ancient Sumer, there's a bunch of different depictions of these kings that lived lives that were way longer than biological humans lived. And then there's the flood myth or the flood story. And then after the flood, biological life decreases pretty radically. And it seems to get back to like a normal version of what we assume now, which is like 100 years. And one of the weird questions that these alternative ancient historians have is, are we missing the possibility that there was a hyper advanced civilization that existed tens of thousands of years ago, and that what we're seeing now is not a linear progression from caveman to human being with an iPhone in 2026. That along the way there might have been a very high level of sophistication. And the evidence of that might be the pyramids and some of these other ancient structures that are mind boggling as much as you try to explain them away. When you're dealing with 2,300,000 stones, some of them are cut from a quarry 500 miles away. 80 ton stones that are in the ceiling. Perfectly cut granite where it looks like they have diamond drill holes in them. It seems like there's some lost technology. And every society has this flood myth. And every society that has this flood myth, especially these ones that were very advanced somehow or another, like ancient Egypt, they have these depictions of people that lived way longer than people live today. And I wonder if human beings one day will realize, like, oh, if you keep going long enough, a hundred years is silly. Like people can. They'll just figure out what it is that makes people age and die. Fix that and you'll live in an insanely long time. And then if people live an insanely long time and their capacity for reason and logic increases, their capacity for intelligence increases, then you have these insane technologies that were required to do things like build the pyramids and that might be what happens. That might be a natural course of progression that the first thing we realize is 100 years is not enough because I'm 58. I'm a moron still. Like, why am I learning every day? How come I'm getting better at being a person every day? Well, I would have. I should have figured this out already. But you don't ever have time to figure it out.
- [56:39]
Lex Fridman
You don't have time.
- [56:39]
Joe Rogan
There's not enough time.
- [56:40]
Lex Fridman
And you only get one run. Like, I mean, you would take. You want a trial run first, Right on life. And like, okay, Now I kind of know a little bit how it works. Now let's do it for real.
- [56:49]
Joe Rogan
Well, that's the concept.
- [56:50]
Lex Fridman
It's kind of scary. I mean, it's a bit crazy that each of us is put in charge of a whole human life, right? Like, are we really like reach the level of like if you want to run an airplane, you have to go through these certifications and stuff, right? And then maybe you can be a pilot. But like for a human life, it's like every single person, like, okay, you have 100% dictatorial control of this person, like that completely hostage your whims and then that's like us, but that's the way it is. But yeah, having the ability to kind of try different things and maybe do like have a kind of opportunity to do a do over. If the life turned out to be like every 50 years or something, you have a chance to kind of, or
- [57:37]
Joe Rogan
maybe not even a do over, but it's the same life. But you can do whatever you want. And you don't have to be constrained to this idea that you only have a certain amount of time and you want to retire by your 65. We might look at that as being like one of the first completely archaic notions and the reason why people got it all wrong, like, well, society will be better because people are going to live way longer. And if you think about how much smarter, how old are you?
- [58:01]
Lex Fridman
53.
- [58:02]
Joe Rogan
Okay, now the way you said that was sad. I'm older than you, doc, don't worry about it. But if you think about how much smarter you are at 53 than you were at 13, you know, now imagine how much smarter you will be at 353 or 1053. And if that actually becomes possible, if a person can live to be 100 years, why can't they live to be 4,000 years? If they can figure out what makes people age? If we really can genetically engineer human beings, that's not. Again, that's not breathing underwater. That's just extending life. And if you extend life and extend intellectual capacity and your ability to learn and grow, holy shit, you're dealing with a 2000 year old person. That's a completely different kind of thing. And that could be real someday. And that might be also one of the things that comes along with this new understanding of just life in general. With super intelligent AI, yeah.
- [59:01]
Lex Fridman
No, for sure. Fixing aging and reversing it would be amongst the things that a technologically mature civilization would be able to do.
- [59:09]
Joe Rogan
We just have to get people out of the idea that it's vain. Why do you want to live forever?
- [59:14]
Lex Fridman
Come on. That's what they say now. Right. But when somebody actually has the therapy and you could, like, I'll hear you could either continue to get worse kidneys and more painful knees and wrinkles, and you start forgetting things, or you can take this rejuvenation serum that everybody else is using and they are full of energy and running around and doing stuff. Do you still think it's vain? So I think a lot of this is Stockholm syndrome, that you are kind of faced with the inevitability of aging and decay and have been for thousands of years. So you develop a kind of domestic scaffold that reconciles you to the inevitable.
- [59:53]
Joe Rogan
I like it. Stockholm so far.
- [59:54]
Lex Fridman
Which is maybe adaptive, but only up until the point where there actually might be something you could do to escape. Right. Then if you're too stuck in this mindset, it might sort of prevent you from taking advantage to regain your freedom.
- [60:08]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [60:08]
Lex Fridman
And I think we are now at that stage. We don't yet have the therapies, but there are certainly, like, investments and research and stuff we could do that would hasten the arrival. And I think, in fact, we should have started on a big sort of Manhattan Project to defeat aging, like, decades ago, and maybe we would have better therapies by now then. But for a long time, aging was not seen as a problem, only the specific diseases that are the result of the aging. Yeah, they got all this funding, right. So you have, like, huge research products for Alzheimer's and for heart disease and for cancer. But if you look at the main common cause of most human disease is it's senescence. Like, you're much more likely to get any of these when you're 80 than when you're 20, because your cells gradually decay and gunk builds up, arteries clog up, your DNA mutates, your methylation pattern gets scrambled, your brain shrinks. So rather than just trying to put out the fires one by one after they occur, at some point you just need to sort of try to prevent. Like maybe you need a bit of rain to sort of prevention.
- [61:14]
Joe Rogan
It's kind of amazing how much we've accomplished as a society, as civilization. When you think about the fact that people only live to be a hundred. Kind of incredible.
- [61:22]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it's kind of incredible.
- [61:25]
Joe Rogan
Got rockets and satellites and cell phones and people only live. So it's like everybody has to build on everybody else's intelligence and everybody else's understanding of the world and develop new things and Everybody has to learn those new things.
- [61:38]
Lex Fridman
And each brain is so small that it can only learn a small little specialty, and you need millions of them to. Although it's not entirely clear with humans, if we had been much more long lived, like the way we currently are configured, maybe we would just have gotten too stuck in our ways and sort of stagnated into some sort of ultra conservative society where nobody's allowed to do anything different. Or the old geezers that have their way of doing things just remain forever in charge.
- [62:06]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [62:08]
Lex Fridman
So, I mean, we just don't know. Right. Like, whether that would have slowed progress or accelerated it. But it is. Yeah, it is still amazing. Like, it's a long path from sort of running around in the forest to sort of these. Look at these, like, advanced chip technologies and the whole global supply chain where like thousands of people are working to develop just one little tool that then feeds into the ability to make another tool that eventually makes these leading edge
- [62:41]
Joe Rogan
AI chips where they're layering things four atoms deep.
- [62:45]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's remarkable.
- [62:48]
Joe Rogan
It's incredible. And humans only live to be 100. Imagine what we could accomplish if we lived to be 3,000, you know?
- [62:55]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Or if we were just a little bit, you know, better at these things. Because I think we are sort of the stupidest possible species that are capable of developing advanced technology. Like, because as soon as we evolved to reach that level, we started developing it. Right. And then. So that's where we are, like the dumbest possible. That just barely can do this.
- [63:14]
Joe Rogan
Right. Barely can do this while we're blowing each other up. Yeah, yeah. At the same time, all over the world blowing up people. So. Yeah, but. But maybe a lot of that frantic, stupid, illogical behavior is because we're so finite, like, we're in a rush that, you know, we realize we only have a certain amount of time to get things done. And so this sort of accentuates the desire to control resources and to cement your immortality and to do these things that people love to do. Put their name on buildings. There's a thing that people like to do that it's almost like cementing their immortality. Maybe there'll be less of a desire to do that if people live way longer. And then you would have to assume if you can engineer humans to live longer, you could probably engineer a lot of stupidity out of us. They could just find out why people behaved, Just eliminate lying. What if there's a genetic solution to lying?
- [64:16]
Lex Fridman
Well, or just a really good lie detector.
- [64:19]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, but I mean, what if you can genetically engineer out the desire to lie.
- [64:25]
Lex Fridman
Well, I mean if you had a perfect lie detector, there would be no point in lying because people would just see it immediately. Right.
- [64:34]
Joe Rogan
Or if you could read each other's minds, it'd be fruitless.
- [64:37]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And so that might be closer. I mean who knows what you could do if you sort of had like powerful AI system trained to detect micro expression.
- [64:44]
Joe Rogan
We just all have to get the biggest gray heads with the black eyes like the aliens have. Then you read each other's minds.
- [64:51]
Lex Fridman
You want one of those?
- [64:52]
Joe Rogan
Well, one of the weirder things that Bob Lazar said. Again, I don't know if you're into this UFO stuff, but he was one of the guys that was a whistleblower that said he back engineered crafts for the United States government in the 1980s. They don't have any controls in these crafts supposedly and that they're all powered by the mines of the beings that are running it and that they have. It's almost like these crafts are alive and they have some sort of a sinking with the thing that instead of like pressing buttons and working a joystick, they just sync with this creation and then they can propel it with their minds. So their minds become the computer that moves this thing around.
- [65:33]
Lex Fridman
I'm a bit skeptical. I haven't looked into that. As I long you should be.
- [65:37]
Joe Rogan
Sounds crazy. How could you not be scared? Anybody who's not skeptical sounds crazy. But if you think about where we are now and where we're going to be, the possibility of that being our future is pretty likely.
- [65:49]
Lex Fridman
Right. I think that the kind of possibility of engineering something like that with sufficiently advanced technology would be there, like all kinds of stuff. Basically everything that doesn't violate some law of physics to a first approximation you would be able to construct.
- [66:06]
Joe Rogan
And even when we say that it's like our current understanding of physics, it's not the understanding of physics. A society that's a million years older than ours, because that's, I mean that's a blink in the eye of the time that it took to create what we are at right now from the Big Bang. Like a million years is nothing.
- [66:26]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, but even with our current understanding of what physics permits, that's still an enormous space of designs and types of life. And being that you could imagine instantiating, you could have like a Dyson sphere, you've heard of this concept, right? It's basically like using the output of the sun for energy generation. And you could have like you surround the sun by solar panels that then Powers a civilization infrastructure maybe like a computer. Like imagine the already we have AI compute growing at 240% per year or something with this. And then imagine the kind of mind that could run on that sized computer. So people are wondering whether could machines be conscious? And discussing that. I think maybe the more pertinent quantum is are we really conscious? I think barely. So you're driving on the road for two and a half hours a motorist, right? And driving past thousands of people and homes and mothers with their strollers. And then after, does he remember any of that? Was he even really aware of any of this while he was driving? It's like a little diffused sense of body and some murky perceptions floating through. Maybe some confused abstract idea that we don't really understand. That's kind of the consciousness that can fit into this coconut sized biological organ that we think and we think, wow, we are so conscious. But like imagine this Dyson sphere consciousness or like a mind that maybe spans a galaxy. I think the difference between the sort of awareness that it could have and our awareness might be like bigger than the difference between our awareness and like whatever a flea has or something like that, way bigger. So it could be this transition where we develop super intelligent minds that for the first time is really life waking up and becoming truly aware. And that we are a little bit sort of over proud in our own specialness when we think that we have achieved something close to the maximum level of that. We are the standard by which consciousness should be measured. And we are this kind of feeble, confused, murky glimmer that is barely sentient at all. So that's like I think maybe the big challenge for our era, giving birth to super intelligence and then hopefully shaping and nurturing it and stirring it so that it becomes a positive thing both for us ourselves and also for it itself and also for whatever other. If there are other super beings somewhere in the world or in the cosmos that it sort of is able to get along with us and contribute positively at the cosmic scale. And that's a very multifaceted challenge. But I think that's kind of seems to be what's going on.
- [69:42]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, and it's hard for people to think that far ahead. You know, you just think of intelligence being something superior to what we currently experience. But when you're talking about a computer or a being, a conscious being that is infinitely more powerful than anything we can imagine, that seems to be what if everything keeps going in the same general direction and AI increases its power and we figure out new ways to power it. And then because one of the things that AI needs that's so interesting is it needs enormous amounts of power. And so the just these AI centers that they're developing now, they're like Google's doing one where they're developing their own nuclear power. Do you want some coffee?
- [70:29]
Lex Fridman
Are you there?
- [70:30]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, right here. I saw you reaching for your cup. You shouldn't be drinking out of paper cups anyway, man.
- [70:36]
Lex Fridman
I don't usually do that, so.
- [70:37]
Joe Rogan
I know, I don't either, but occasionally I do. But they're so bad for you.
- [70:41]
Lex Fridman
I'm usually quite conscientious with, yeah, coming
- [70:44]
Joe Rogan
a little bit upset even when I go on the road. I've started taking a little yeti coffee cup with me so I could buy coffee and just have them put it in that the inside of those things is just lined with plastic. You're pouring hot water into plastic and then the plastic leeches into your coffee
- [71:02]
Lex Fridman
to do that normally. But I figured like, for having a chat with you on the Jorgenshot would be worth like, I guess, some hundred microplastics.
- [71:12]
Joe Rogan
Well, thank you. I think what we're talking about is inevitable. If human beings don't blow ourselves up, if we don't get hit with an asteroid, blow ourselves up, or a super volcano doesn't eradicate civilization, all this stuff is. It's inevitable. It's just, it's how much time does it take and how much does it grow exponentially in power? Because we're talking about computers. Then they start bringing up quantum computing and quantum computers ability to do calculations, and it doesn't even make sense. And so you think like, well, this is just one version of that. Like, what if. What is a quantum computing going to look like 500 years from now? Like, what is computing power which is connected to AI? What is that going to look like 500 years from now? It's impossible to even guess.
- [72:03]
Lex Fridman
Well, we can sort of see lower bounds on what's possible. Like thinking already of just the designs we can conceive of that we see in principle you could make. Maybe it'll take a lot of grind to get there, but at least that establishes like a lower bound of what a technologically mature civilization could do. And then maybe they have additional ideas beyond that. But. But already that is enough to really unlock. So if you think of a space of possible modes of being, like a mode of being is a way of experiencing living, interacting. I think you look around humanity and all people who have existed in the past, a lot of different characters, right? Men, women, mean people, nasty people, crazy people. But I think all of that diversity of human experience is like a tiny little corner in this space of possible modes of being. Like, it's a huge cathedral and we've been kind of basically sitting in the janitor's closet. That's like the exploration we've done. And the kinds of modes of being, the kinds of ways of experiencing and relating to each other or thinking and doing stuff that are ultimately possible is just this enormous space that we haven't been able to explore. Because ultimately, what we can currently conceive of and imagine and experience and feel is, like, limited to our biological substrate, the human brain. And just as your earlier human ancestors from a few million years ago that you were talking about before, they wouldn't really have been able to conceive of the modern human condition. Not just because I didn't think of it, but because, like, the ape brain can't really. They don't. Like, even if you try to describe it to them somehow, like, what is music? What is humor? What is romantic love? Like, what is science? What is, like, all of these things? What's literature? Like? It just doesn't fit into. Right. And so presumably, I mean, you could think right now we achieved the right brain size where all possible values and interesting ideas are accessible to us. That seems kind of implausible. It seems much more likely that just as the chimpanzees are necessarily blind to, like, a lot of what can give life meaning and value and significance, though, probably. Are we too?
- [74:28]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, they don't even have the capacity for it, which is interesting.
- [74:31]
Lex Fridman
They can't even think of it.
- [74:32]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, we think of them as being so intelligent, and they are in comparison to a lot of other animals. But I think one of the things that they were puzzled by when they started teaching primates sign language was that they never asked questions. Like, they don't seem to have questions about stuff. So they exist in an intelligent way. They can figure things out, they can do things. They know when the door's left unlocked, they understand fairness, which is really weird. Like, chimps get very upset if they're treated unfairly. Like, if one chimp gets something and they don't get. They get super violent, but they don't have a lot of questions. You know, we're filled with questions like, so what. What are we missing that the next stage of being a human will have that we're not even considering now because it's not a part of our experience.
- [75:24]
Lex Fridman
Like, what's the asking question type of thing that we are not able to imagine. And I'm with many of those types of things. Yeah.
- [75:32]
Joe Rogan
And the possibilities are literally endless. We just don't conceive of them because we're trapped in this territorial primate mindset.
- [75:41]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah, I think that's likely.
- [75:46]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, I think so too. I think so too. I think the possibilities are endless. And I think it's going to be really, really weird if that happens inside of our lifetime because you and I were, you know, close to the same age. So we grew up with answering machines. You probably remember the first cell phones you probably got online. And probably. When did you get online? Like the early 96. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, See, I think for me it was 94. So we, we got to see all this happen. If we get to see the new version of humans in our lifetime, that would be like literally bonkers. What an amazing time to be alive. If you really think about it, we're so fortunate because if you grew up between like 1700 and 1800, how much did shit change 1600 to 1700? Would you make a better boat? Like, what's different? Not a lot of different, man. Everybody kind of is the same for a hundred years. And inside of our lifetime, from the 19, the late 1960s for me to the early 70s for you, in the amount of time that we've been alive, things have radically changed. Really, really radically to the point where it's probably the biggest shift in human ingenuity and innovation that the world's ever seen. And we're just in the middle of it and we might be in the middle of the next one, which literally allows us to see what the world looks like a thousand years from now. Because you're going to be alive.
- [77:22]
Lex Fridman
I mean, that's why it is now this full time job, just to monitor the situation. Like it's really. But it is.
- [77:27]
Joe Rogan
How do you do that?
- [77:29]
Lex Fridman
Well, you don't really, but if you try to sort of. So I think the opportunity. So it used to be like, at least in my sphere effect, if you're doing philosophy or something like it, most people would think you have a kind of unlimited time horizon. People have been working on philosophical questions for thousands of years and there doesn't seem to be any huge urgency if they have been unsolved for thousands of years, maybe if it takes another 500 or so. But I always thought of philosophy as having a deadline, meaning that at some point we would develop smarter than human forms of intelligence, presumably AI, that could then do the Philosophy much better than us. And so there was a limited period of time during which any advances I could contribute to would be meaningful and that it would then make sense on focusing on that subset of philosophical questions or general questions that we really need the answer to now, as opposed to like 10, 20 years in the future when somebody else can do them better, like the machine minds. So that's kind of been a lens through which I have selected the things to work on. And now, of course, that deadline is moving closer, so there's less time remaining. And so my focus is increasingly drifting towards questions where it might be relevant to have the answer to now rather than a year or two from now.
- [79:01]
Joe Rogan
You're almost like a cultural navigator, like a guy with a sextant at the helm of a ship looking at the constellations, going, I think we're in the right direction.
- [79:12]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. But now we're sort of moving maybe close to harbor. And you need to pay more attention to exactly how deep the rocks are. The rocks are. And look, scan around you.
- [79:26]
Joe Rogan
When you think about a timeline for radical change, what in your mind, what do you think that looks like?
- [79:35]
Lex Fridman
Well, I mean, I take short timelines seriously with AI for what we know, it could be like. Could be like a year or two or three or four and probably be a bit longer, but we're no longer at a point where we can be confident that we won't have super intelligence in just a few years. Like it could happen.
- [79:57]
Joe Rogan
What is that when you say that for the uninitiated, what do you mean by superintelligence?
- [80:01]
Lex Fridman
Well, I guess we first have AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, AI that can do all the stuff that we can do. And then superintelligence would just be that, but can do it way better than any human can do. So all technical, intellectual, common sense tasks. And then you would have robotics as well, that can do all the physical stuff not much later. And so this. Yeah, so the timeline remains uncertain, but I think it's not impossible that this could happen very soon. And then once you have super intelligence, then I think from there on it might be like a sort of sprint to something approximating technological maturity. Because what you have super intelligence that then designs Even more smart AIs using its kind of super intelligent AI research capability and designing better chips and all of that. So you might then have this intelligence explosion where you go from something slightly greater than human level to some radical super intelligence that can then sort of invent whatever the remaining technologies are. Maybe there needs to be some trial and error and experiments in the physical world, that slows things down a bit. But some smallish number, like a single digit number of years from superintelligence, I think you might have something that unlocks all these sci fi level capabilities that we've talked about, at least that seems relatively plausible to me,
- [81:39]
Joe Rogan
seems inevitable. And my question is, how does it announce itself? Does it send a mass text message to the whole world? Everybody's phone just starts like, you know when you have those Amber alerts and your phone starts vibrating or when there's some sort of a storm warning, all of a sudden your phone goes off and then it alerts you to the fact that it's taken over.
- [82:02]
Lex Fridman
Well, so this, I mean, so here we don't really know. It's like this is very confusing and we've never done this before. And so this is very hard to figure out how this is going to unfold. And maybe it's not even fixed yet. Maybe it depends a little bit on which we do and the extent to which different actors get their stuff together. But I guess one possible type of scenario is where things are just accelerating. There are more and more of these advances, model releases. Increasingly there is automation of the research process. In AI labs, like already you have coding assistants that are really useful to people in AI labs. They're using them to write a lot of their software. Right now you still need humans for sort of the research taste and judgment. And sometimes things get stuck and you need a human to kind of redirect them. But more and more of that make it automated. And then you have kind of new iterations of models being trained at the faster and faster clip. They can do more and more stuff. They start to automate increasing chunks of the economy. So right now a lot of coding is automated, but like other areas as well, maybe they become dropping virtual workers that, that can do everything like a human could do with a remote connection initially. And then you have people working on robotics. So that would start to kick in. And then eventually just more and more of the action is run by these AI systems, one or more, and they're kind of doing it at their timescale, which is speeding up. Then from that point it would depend a lot on whether we have successfully aligned these systems so that they actually do what the people created them intended, or whether they have somehow gone off the rails.
- [84:11]
Joe Rogan
There's also the fear that America doesn't come up with it first.
- [84:16]
Lex Fridman
This is, yeah, that's mostly a fear in America. Like in China, for example, America comes
- [84:23]
Joe Rogan
up with it First, I mean it's, it's really just America and China that are at the forefront of this race, right? Yeah, Russia a little bit, but not on the same level.
- [84:31]
Lex Fridman
Not Russia?
- [84:32]
Joe Rogan
No, not Russia. Who else is it?
- [84:34]
Lex Fridman
Did you see this last week?
- [84:36]
Joe Rogan
Ford hiring 350 engineers after AI failed shows failed, shows human value in AI era. What does that mean?
- [84:44]
Lex Fridman
I tried to find the only one
- [84:45]
Joe Rogan
that didn't manage this, did it?
- [84:47]
Lex Fridman
They rehired a bunch of engineers they
- [84:49]
Joe Rogan
fired after their AI wasn't matching the quality they needed. Oh, and this is Ford. That's interesting. They probably jumped the gun, you know, they probably fired them too quickly. And now these people that they rehire, these people are gonna like, oh, how much time we have left? Six months before AI figures out how to do this.
- [85:09]
Lex Fridman
Just as well. I mean, it, it's also possible that things, timelines could extend if like one way that could happen is the progress we've seen in the last 10 years, which has been remarkable. It's to a substantial extent driven by the advances, the increase in compute that is being used to train and run these systems. It used to be that you had a cutting edge AI system. If you were academic, running on your PC in your office, that was kind of the amount of computing power that was applied to doing AI stuff. And now of course you have these kind of tens of billions of dollar data centers, like hundreds of megawatts. Just massive funding. So the chips have gotten better, but also just the amount of funding, you're just building many more of these chips. So as you apply more and more compute performance improves. And that has been a big driver. Now at some point you might not be able to keep increasing the amount of money you spend on it, because you can go from $1,000 PC to a million dollars quite easily, and you can go from a million dollars to a billion dollars. And now maybe you're spending on the order of a trillion dollars across the world to build data centers per year. But you can't really do three orders of magnitude very easily there. There's not 1000 trillion dollars to spend on it. So at some point just expenditure has to kind of slow down. So if we haven't achieved superintelligence by then, then maybe that would mean progress gets slower if the main driver is the scale up of compute. Now it is also true that some of the progress is driven by algorithmic advances, like just kind of clever algorithms. So that might continue. But if one driver stalls out, then that could result in faster progress. And then of course there Is a possibility that the people who want to pass or regulate AI gain enough traction to kind of get regulatory inhibitions.
- [87:17]
Joe Rogan
How would they do that though? If there really is some sort of a Manhattan Project style race between the United States and China and what other countries are developing AI right now that are close?
- [87:26]
Lex Fridman
Well, I mean those are the, those
- [87:28]
Joe Rogan
are the two big ones.
- [87:29]
Lex Fridman
The big ones.
- [87:30]
Joe Rogan
Is it possible that someone could sneak up on us and develop super intelligent AI first?
- [87:35]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean it's possible if there were some big algorithmic breakthrough, for example, that made it a lot more efficient to run a similar level of capability with less sort of AI data center infrastructure. And many other countries are also trying. It's just that they are not as advanced and out of US And China, I'd say like us currently has the, the edge.
- [87:59]
Joe Rogan
What would happen if China got there first?
- [88:01]
Lex Fridman
Well, I mean part would depend on whether they had successfully aligned their AI. If it's on the line, then I guess the same thing happens as if US AI is on the line. That is the future gets shaped according to whatever values this AI had ended up with. If the alignment problem is solved, then it might make a difference because then the values would then depend on the people who owned and controlled or governed it would ask it to pursue. So then in that scenario maybe it makes some difference who initiates it.
- [88:43]
Joe Rogan
So right now the big players are there's Google and there's OpenAI. There's all these different companies. When you say alignment, do they have to all be kind of on the same page or like when aligned? We're not going to be aligned if there's a bunch of corporations that are competing to come up with this first. So they have to be aligned in terms of the way they're programmed, that they're valuing human life and that they're valuing society. What do you mean by alignment?
- [89:11]
Lex Fridman
Well, so I mean just the technical challenge of if you are building an AI system and you have certain things you want it to do and certain things you don't want it to do.
- [89:20]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [89:20]
Lex Fridman
Are you technically able to get the AI to behave that way?
- [89:24]
Joe Rogan
You as the person who gets to decide.
- [89:26]
Lex Fridman
Well, that's not a separate question which is equally important maybe, but different because that's not the technical. Like you can't just go to the whiteboard and write down some formula. Now you have, that's like the political question ultimately question of governance.
- [89:39]
Joe Rogan
Yes.
- [89:40]
Lex Fridman
So there you need, you know, political organization appeals to the best in human nature dialogues like checks and balances, whatever Stuff that might work in the political arena to hope that the governance of this, that the values to which it is aligned are sort of benign values that hopefully incorporates a wide set of stakeholders.
- [90:03]
Joe Rogan
Right, but that's a little. Isn't that a little naive? Because whenever there's any sort of a situation where something has massive amounts of power above others, one of the first things they think of is what's the most money you can generate doing it, and what is the best way to generate the most amount of money. They're going to think that way. They're not going to think what's the best for the human race. No one ever thinks that way. They think what is the best way in terms of destroying the competition? What is the best way in terms of extracting the most resources out of this? Making it work. For me, that's what people think of immediately. And what's the best way to stop other people from competing with us?
- [90:43]
Lex Fridman
Right. So there would be, I think, a lot of pressures and strains on whatever governance mechanism exists at the time when superintelligence is developed.
- [90:57]
Joe Rogan
Right. So is this something that the technology is so far ahead, the potential for it to be so far ahead of our understanding of what it's going to be able to do that like making laws for that now it's going to be very difficult to even explain to people, like, we need these laws and we need these guardrails in place now, because here's what could happen. And that conversation's not really happening right now.
- [91:24]
Lex Fridman
It is happening.
- [91:25]
Joe Rogan
But is it happening politically?
- [91:27]
Lex Fridman
It's starting to happen, yeah. Yeah, it's been happening to an increasing extent politically, and there have been various actions.
- [91:34]
Joe Rogan
Okay, like what actions?
- [91:36]
Lex Fridman
Well, so a few years ago, for example, that was the whole expert export regime imposed by the US on chips, the most advanced chips where, like China was cut out from being able to access the most advanced Nvidia chips and so forth. And that's kind of been modified, but that was motivated to a significant extent by trying to preserve AI edge that the US has.
- [92:03]
Joe Rogan
Right, but that's like internationally, I mean, in terms of like being able to stop corporations from having the kind of power that this could provide them.
- [92:13]
Lex Fridman
So then there have been various efforts. There was like proposition in California where there were various things. More recently you saw the whole thing. I don't know if you followed it with the Mythos and Fable five, the anthropic models that Mythos has not been released. This is the most powerful model because it seems to have significant cyber offense capabilities. It can easily detect vulnerabilities in software. And so Anthropic figured that rather than immediately making it available to everybody, maybe it would be better to first try to make it available to providers of critical software infrastructure like big banks and they can patch up their Systems. And then Fable 5 was a kind of restricted version of the Mythos model, like the same underlying model, but with extra safeguards. It basically refused anything that remotely seemed like cyber hacking, programming, biological stuff, because maybe that would be bio. So like it sort of drew a wide circle around anything that even remotely looked possibly dangerous and it just refuses that. So that was released. But then after like a week or so, the administration imposed a kind of export restriction that prevented any non US citizen from using it. And that meant Anthropic had to cut it off for everybody because they didn't have have a way in real time to verify who is a US citizen or not.
- [93:58]
Joe Rogan
Oh wow.
- [93:59]
Lex Fridman
So then it was like unavailable for several weeks and intense negotiations behind the scenes and working to try to figure out because allegedly it was possible to jailbreak it so that it sometimes gave some little assistance with some cyber like finding vulnerabilities in code. And now recently it just became available again because they had reached some understandable with the government where it was deemed sufficiently safeguarded to be released. And now there is efforts underway to try to work out the framework because in the future you wouldn't want to do this on an ad hoc basis. Somebody just decides this particular model for some unspecified reason. You want to have clear standards. Ideally that applies to everybody, every company. So there's now some industry wide effort to try to work with the governments anyway. So there's a lot of this stuff happening. I expect much more of this going forward. It just has recently become like a serious issue. People until recently were kind of ignoring the whole AI thing for the most part. And then there is a second wave coming I think once. So so far we haven't really seen any big impact on the labor market right from AI. But once that starts to hit and you get maybe high levels of unemployment amongst white collar workers. Imagine if you have millions and millions of people that have their university diplomas. They feel a sense of superiority and entitlement. They've gone through the whole process, they got their degree and now they expect a well paying job and then there is no job for them. They've got nothing to do all day long but complain about AI. So you gotta have all these well educated people who feel resentful and are gonna say every Possible bad thing about AI that could be said all day long and mobilize. There's a very powerful political constituency that will emerge from that that's not even yet happened. But that will kind of add to all of these other grievances that people point to with AI. So I think there's gotta be kind of significant political pressures for doing something about AI.
- [96:12]
Joe Rogan
Isn't that the key is getting ahead of it though? So how can people find. How can we see the vulnerabilities in advance and recognize when this is going to. If there is going to be a tipping point and a bunch of white collar workers are going to be out of work and there's going to get to a point where we realize this is coming. This is like three weeks from now. What do we do? Like, what do they do?
- [96:36]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, so that's not clear to me at least. I mean, a lot of people think they have different views about what you've been on, of course, but it's like very hard to have an. It's such a complex strategic. I mean, I've been thinking about this for like three decades maybe and I still feel extremely unsure even which direction is kind of up and which is down. Yeah, I don't think it would be possible right now to sort of figure out a detailed, perfect regulatory scheme or system of laws because there's so many unknowns. I think we need to sort of watch this closely as it happens and be ready to react quickly to issues that come up and hope that relevant people are highly competent and well motivated and are trying their best. And then on the margin, maybe we can do things that kind of are constructive and increases the chances that it will be for the good. If and when I have some clear insight as to some overall big directional push, I will let you know. But even basic questions like for example, do we want more government involvement or less government involvement? Do we want faster progress in AI or slower progress in AI? I don't know. It's not completely obvious to me.
- [98:08]
Joe Rogan
Well, I think it's eventually going to get to wherever it's going to get. Either way, having it slower, I don't know if that's really going to help us. I think almost like we have to crash and then we have to figure out how to to rebuild and pick up the pieces. I don't think we're going to be intelligent or have enough foresight to recognize where all these flaws and where all these problems are going to ultimately be. I think they're just going to have to happen and then people are going to have to adjust. That's what I think.
- [98:39]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So I'm not advocating an AI pass. By contrast to a lot of some of my colleagues and friends and stuff who are like, I could see some scenario in which it would be helpful at some point to have a temporary slowdown of a few months, maybe or half a year or a year. If you imagine there are different companies, countries maybe racing to get there first. And then eventually somebody figures out they basically have the system in place. They just need to amp up, run it for longer. They can see that it will become super intolerant. They hope it's aligned. It might be very helpful in that situation to have a few extra months just to sort of double check all your safeguards. And rather than immediately cranking all the knobs up to 11, like maybe sort of do it a little bit incrementally, watch what happens, study it, then crank it up a little bit more. I just think you might gain some extra safety if you have a few extra months there. Like the pressures on these people in the lab.
- [99:39]
Joe Rogan
That makes sense.
- [99:39]
Lex Fridman
If it's all going to happen over a week, it's just going to be. This is the first time we ever do this hugely complex thing. It has to be right. We never get a second chance. Just being able to, like even just being able to sleep properly between your work sessions and having a weekend to mold things over. Just that kind of. Humans don't really operate well in these super short timelines. So I think if you could be sure that the pause would in fact be limited and short and then it would be lifted. I think that could be quite useful to have. If it could also be timed to be at the right moment and well implemented.
- [100:20]
Joe Rogan
But wouldn't the problem be espionage, first of all?
- [100:22]
Lex Fridman
That's one issue with it.
- [100:24]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. If somebody realized, hey, they're about three days away from this, and then China bribes a bunch of people and people take off and move to.
- [100:36]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. There are various Beijing. There are various downsides to passing. So one is that there are competitors who just, even without espionage, are catching up. Another is it's not as if the world is safe without AI.
- [100:54]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [100:55]
Lex Fridman
There are other, like whether the natural hazards, I think they are very small, like super volcanoes and stuff like that on the relevant timescales until they're not. Well, I mean, we've survived for hundreds of thousands of years. Right.
- [101:08]
Joe Rogan
We're almost wiped out entirely 70,000 years ago.
- [101:10]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, well, that's a long time ago.
- [101:11]
Joe Rogan
Is it though? Not if it happens tomorrow.
- [101:15]
Lex Fridman
Well, if something hasn't done us in that long a time, probably it's not going to do us in within the next 10 years.
- [101:21]
Joe Rogan
Boy, you're more optimistic than me.
- [101:23]
Lex Fridman
Well, it's just based on the actual empirics of these natural catastrophes. By contrast, I would say there are other hazards that are not low. I mean we have rapid advances in synthetic biology, some of them driven or enabled maybe even by already AI progress that has already taken place that can start to assist with this and more just happening independently. So you get increasing risks from things like synthetic biology. We still have the nuclear arsenals, right. Kind of existing. We think have gotten a little bit complacent about the risks of nuclear war and various other things as well. So I think there's like a background level of existential risk that humanity faces in the absence of super intolerance that probably is growing as well. So you don't want to wait so long that you don't even get the chance to roll the dice with AI because you destroyed yourself before you even got to that point. That would kind of be sad. And then also, I mean, I think there is like some risk if you set up a pause infrastructure that what's initially meant to be a temporary thing becomes permanent. Like they say there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government program. If you set up the infrastructure to actually control this, ideally at a global scale, it's meant to be for six months. What happens after six months? Nobody can still prove that the AI will be safe. So you have all these people now whose job it is to regulate it and maybe they could become kind of frozen in and become permanent. And then also the delay benefits of this. So if you think what like 65 million people die every year, that's a lot of human lives, that's like 1 9, 11 every 25 minutes, just kind of boom.
- [103:27]
Joe Rogan
Like that's a way to look at it.
- [103:30]
Lex Fridman
And so there is a certain urgency if there is something that somehow could have a chance to, to fix this. Like all the suffering that is happening in the world aside from the people dying, like all the people who are bereaved, right, who lost their loved one and then all the disease that led up to that dying, right? And then all the non disease related, all the horrible poverty and like the suicidal depression and the animals in the animal factories that are like spending there's just like this, this I think moral urgency that if there is a hope that getting AI right could fix this, then you don't want to wait unnecessarily long because every day is just this massive horror. So I think there are many reasons for why you wouldn't want unnecessary or excessive delays in developing AI, but there is a trade off. Because if we can make more progress on AI safety and alignment and get our act together a little bit before we take the plunge, that's also where quite a lot
- [104:33]
Joe Rogan
it's. It's certainly exciting because the possibilities are right in front of us and they're kind of endless. And it seems like they're right in front of us. It seems like to. In my mind, it seems like we're like 24 months away from something really insane.
- [104:49]
Lex Fridman
It could be. Could be. Could be 48 months. It could be. I mean, we don't. We don't. Yeah, right.
- [104:54]
Joe Rogan
It could be. Yeah. Who knows? But there's something happening really quickly. You know, when I talked to Elon about Grok, he said it shocks us like every couple weeks. We're like, how is it doing this? How is it so fast? How is it advancing so quickly? And one day cat's gonna be out of the bag and there's not gonna be any way to stop it. Like if the power went out right now, if there was some sort of a massive solar flare that killed our power grids and all computer hard drives got fried and we had a restart from now, like we would have to rebuild society. Right. But if we get to the point where this thing understands what would cause that, how to prevent that, how to make sure that never happens, Much better power supply, much better allocation of resources, much better batteries, much better redundant data systems where you never have to worry about hard drives crashing and you never have to worry about any of these problems. Like any information you have now will be secure and then understanding of natural disasters will actually get drill into this volcano and it never goes off. Like, there's going to be a few things that they're going to figure out through AI that's going to prevent a lot of the things that have probably wiped out enormous swaths of people. I mean, imagine if we could just actually see asteroids coming, all of them, and know how to divert them instantaneously. We have a bunch of ideas right now on how to do it. Right. Like coding them.
- [106:26]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [106:27]
Joe Rogan
With something that changes the aerodynamics of them.
- [106:30]
Lex Fridman
And I think that one would be relatively easy. I mean, even we could figure out to do that, I think.
- [106:35]
Joe Rogan
And there's also detonating them. There's a bunch of different crazy ideas. But imagine if AI's like actually you could just do this, you know, and then you put a shield over the Earth and you never have to worry about it, ever. The shield's powered by the sun, so you have ultimate power and you never have to worry about being hit by a Manhattan sized asteroid.
- [106:54]
Lex Fridman
I think the trickier ones might be ones that are more internal to civilization. If you have some process that's either like a worldwide process with different humans and corporations and governments, or an internal process in the AI. On the one hand, you want to be able to continue to develop new ideas, new ways of doing things, so you need to experiment and try new things. But then there is also the risk of just keep trying new ideas like that eventually you get stuck on some idea that actually proves really harmful or dangerous to you and that you then sort of derail internally through your own mimetic or internal evolutionary development. So how to sort of grow up safely in this world where you have unlocked all kinds of new technological capabilities, Even if you're easily able to protect yourself against external threats like volcanoes and asteroids and stuff. Right. There might still be processes arising from within this global civilization. Just as we might invent new technologies that are dangerous, we might invent and drugs that are super addictive. Once you invent them, you try them and then you're addicted. You never want to. Oh, there could be other, like some crazy ideology that once it takes hold. I'm glad you brought that up because
- [108:22]
Joe Rogan
that's one of the major fears that a lot of people have is that human beings will develop ideologies based around AI, that there'll be like an AI God that someone develops.
- [108:34]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And I mean, I think that's. In fact, I would add that to the list of. I mentioned nuclear and bioterrorist risk as like background existential risks. Like another is like some form of insanity, like collective insanity. I feel our civilizational sanity already is kind of a little bit precarious. I think we're just kind of maybe barely holding ourselves together. And it's amazing how well the world functions despite how crazy people are and how much they loathe their opponents and so forth, and still manage to somehow get it to work.
- [109:11]
Joe Rogan
There's also manipulation of the zeitgeist that's clearly being done by bots. So you've got a bunch of people online that are having arguments on Twitter and they're not even talking to people. There's a bunch of ideas that are being pushed out on Twitter and a lot of these social media platforms. It's not even Human beings tweeting about it. It's not. There's algorithms, there's AI, there's people that are hired to do it. There's people that are working for certain organizations that are hired to muddy up the waters. Gaslight people create problems, have people argue with each other. And so it's like if AI recognizes how easy it is to manipulate people, do whatever it wants, that's a fear as well.
- [109:56]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So whenever you change the basic parameters of sort of the social, cultural, political discourse, new dynamics will emerge. And we don't have the kind of social science that is able to predict what happens if you change some of these knobs. So we've seen in the past, like you invent, let's go all the way back, like somebody invents writing. Okay. So that, that turns out to have had a huge effect not just on people writing literature and stuff, but on political systems. So you could now have states that could keep tax records. So you could have larger political units with writing. And then they can hire standing armies. And now you have large scale war. You have social stratification. You could have the ruler of a large area could have enormous wealth, and you could have a soldier caste that protects against internal and external. So just the way that human societies are politically organized changes as a result of this change in the rules of communication. When you can have written texts. Right. And then you have the printing press again with 100 years of religious wars in Europe, like reformation and all of this stuff is possibly. And then forms of democracy later on also coming out of this and the scientific revolution. Then you have like mass media in the last century with like radio and stuff. And you have kind of demagogues that take advantage of being able to simultaneously talk to millions of people, because that was never possible before.
- [111:31]
Joe Rogan
Right, right.
- [111:31]
Lex Fridman
You could have some charismatic kind of guy who's like rallies up the whole nation and then new ideologies become mimetically fit in that situation that might never have if it were people writing kind of letters to the editor. It's kind of a different type of idea that works there than if you're giving a kind of stump speech that goes out to millions simultaneously. And now with social media, of course, we have another one of these. And you do see that starting to change culture in different ways. And now with AI being the next wave of this, that will also change. You have bots, you have new ways of finding information. You have maybe AIs that can themselves be super persuaders. That will also change, presumably in some unknowable way, the way that social discourse pans out. And for any one of these, I guess it could turn out to be a lot better. We could become more informed, having AI advisors. I think that's a fairly likely scenario. But it's also possible somehow the dynamics shape out in a different way and we kind of go collectively insane in some way.
- [112:33]
Joe Rogan
Back to the whitewater raft.
- [112:35]
Lex Fridman
White backwater raft, yes. And it all becomes kind of totalitarian or we sort of of fragment into political warring tribes, or we become kind of completely unhinged. Every one of us becomes convinced of their own little nutty theory that they then like their AI or feed just serves them more material to kind of fuel their conviction. There are different ways in which this could go badly.
- [113:00]
Joe Rogan
But don't you think even if that happens, ultimately the progress of AI won't stop? And so again, I keep going back to this thing, but I think this is really what it is. We have to change. Like what it means to be a person. All those things are only problems if people stay what we are now, which is territorial primates with desire to possess material goods. For some strange reason, even though we're a finite life form, if all that changes, if we change what it means to be a person, which seems inevitable.
- [113:35]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [113:36]
Joe Rogan
Then it won't matter. Then if we all, like, if we. If there's no if we could figure out a way to literally engineer out all of the issues that humans have with greed and violence and all the. All the different things that trouble society. If the desire for that is no longer a part of being a person, which is. That's doable, That's. That seems like if we're going to continue to evolve past, you know, Australia, Pythagoras to Homo sapien 2026, if we continue the same amount of time in the future, we probably won't be like that anymore. The best versions of people aren't people that want to steal your house and steal your land and shoot you and take your resources. That's the best. People are the people that contribute and they're interesting and they make you excited to be around them. You like it. If that keeps going on and if that is aided by technology, if we recognize that there's actual patterns of human thinking and behavior that can be changed and that if we all agree to subscribe to this algorithm, to connect to this computer program, connect to this external device, or maybe not even external, maybe. Maybe it's internal, that allows us to communicate with each other telepathically, like all that all that changes and then it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if there's any guardrails for AI or not, because we're not the same thing anymore. Like all the problem, the worry that we have about AI, the worry we have about power manipulation and the ability to influence people, all that kind of goes away if people don't behave the way they behave currently.
- [115:18]
Lex Fridman
Well, I guess here is one difference with your like white water rafting metaphor that. So the one in that metaphor, it's kind of we need to hang on. Like there's a risk we could smash ourselves on the rock, but if we don't do that, then there's kind of one way we end up right downstream.
- [115:36]
Joe Rogan
We end up in a nice lake.
- [115:37]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. But I think in reality, what might also be the case that in addition to trying to not smash ourselves on the rock, there might be places where the choices we make affect the ultimate destination.
- [115:51]
Joe Rogan
Right. Go left or go right.
- [115:53]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Or which stream do you follow? Maybe a more. Yeah. And where like if you stare in one direction, you might end up in one place ultimately in some sort of strange post human world. And maybe it's really beautiful and people have the chance to grow into their true self and we love each other and are creative and, and take initiatives and go a different way. Maybe you have a paperclip maximizing AI or maybe that just everything is paperclip. So going a third way, maybe you have like a totalitarian system with like a small elite on top and everybody else.
- [116:28]
Joe Rogan
Sci fi movie.
- [116:29]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. There are many more possibilities and maybe some that kind of we would think would look kind of good if we chose now. But then. And in reality they have some hidden flaw that we didn't think of. So if we chose those, it would sort of be a mistake. And then maybe others that don't look that appealing to us now if we just presented them in a brochure to you. But then actually if you thought hard about it, maybe you would realize that actually would be a really nice place to live. Because in the current world there are places that are nice to visit, that are interesting, but then those are not necessarily the same places we would want to live and raise a kid. Right. So there are like novels and movies that are really fun to watch, but you wouldn't want to live in those worlds. So there's a difference between the kind of what makes for the good interesting story and the place where you actually want to spend the rest of your life. And so I think there would be possibly a Lot of opportunities to make foolish choices or unwise choices or conflicts that sort of thwarts the process and makes us end up not just that we go extinct before we reach them, but that the data that we reach might depend on the level of wisdom and kindness that we have during the process.
- [117:37]
Joe Rogan
And there's always unintended consequences. With every solution that we try to find for any problem that we have, there's always some new thing that comes up. We're like, oh, we didn't see that coming. I mean certainly whenever we're dealing with nature, like whenever they've brought in an invasive species to handle other invasive species, it's always a giant disaster, you know? Yeah, always. There's always unintended consequences. Like, oh, now you have a hundred million frogs. Who's telling us about that? Was it Ali Siddiq that was telling us about the frogs? Who about they brought in? What did they bring in? Forget what the invasive species was, but they brought in this one species to kill another species. And the problem, they didn't realize that that species had been control was like coyotes or I don't forget it was, it was Guam. What was it? What did they get rid of? Whatever it was, they got rid of this thing that had been killing the frogs. So then they had toads, right? Was it toads? So they had millions of these things that were like all over the highway. So you drive on them, just squash them everywhere you go because there was nothing controlling the population of these things. Things anymore. It's like unintended consequences of, you know, because we're, we're very short sighted in, even in our ability to be contemplative about what the possibility of the future is. When you're dealing with such an open ended thing like AI super General intelligence that can maybe make better versions of itself. Like who the hell knows what that means? That's. Are we making a God? Because it seems like if it keeps going and that if it makes better versions of itself, it's ultimately going to get to the point where it could do anything, which is exactly what a God is. It can make universes. You know, what if the ultimate end of this is a big bang button that some scientist invents?
- [119:33]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So we are a little bit like, yeah, it's, I don't know the different analogies one might reach for. But I mean, I guess like, like say you're on a plane and then the pilot has passed out or had a heart attack or something. And now it's like we passengers, we somehow have to, I don't know, figure out how to do the. Run the controls. We're not really. I mean, you have to still try to make your best. Right. But then add to that that all the passengers are fighting amongst each other. Each one thinks they are the guy who should control the. They all convinced that they are the superior person to try to land a plane. So in addition to trying to figure out how the controls work, they are like actually having a big fist fight in the cockpit as well. And somebody's like dragging somebody else away. And there's like the kind of Monka tribe that is the current state of the world here, and we're trying to shepherd this ship of humanity into utopia. Yeah, it's AN Interesting.
- [120:36]
Joe Rogan
It's Dr. Strangelove on steroids, but that's it.
- [120:40]
Lex Fridman
We might only have to get it. So at some point we should be able to hand over the reins. Once you have a sufficiently good AI, maybe get assistance from that point on,
- [120:56]
Joe Rogan
I think it's the first thing that it's going to take over as government. He's going to realize how unbelievably inefficient the government is at doing almost everything and how much of the money that gets allocated is fraud and waste. If you allow AI to sort through that and develop much more efficient pathways to controlling.
- [121:18]
Lex Fridman
And some people would not want to see that particular.
- [121:22]
Joe Rogan
Exactly. That's going to be a problem. But if we get to the point where there's some sort of a hive mind possibility, some sort of. I mean, one of the things that Elon said that I thought was really fascinating, he said, you're going to be able to talk without words? Well, if we're able to talk without words, like, does that eventually get to the point we could read minds? Could we? Is thought and is communication no longer verbal? It's no longer sounds. So right now we associate sounds that I'm making where you know, what words I'm using, what I'm referencing, and we get a certain understanding of what each other is trying to say. Well, what if that's just clunky and that's silly. And what if instead of a scroll that you leave in a cave somewhere, now you have a movie that you can watch, like something much more engrossing and much more, much more powerful, and that this is what human communication becomes. It doesn't. And maybe this is why the Grays don't have mouths. We move away from sounds because right now what we figured out is like sort of like duct tape. We're communicating. We kind of patched it up. We figured out something. We're just going to use noises we make. Well, we have different noises here than the people that live on this island. They have totally different noises. I don't know what the fuck they're saying. And then you have people on the other side of the world, totally different noises. So Tower of Babel type situation, right. Where we really can't communicate with each other unless we have translators. But if we get to the point where that's not how humans communicate, we communicate purely through thought and intention and understanding and that it's no longer based on language, it's no longer based on this is a transistor, this is a coffee mug. Instead. It's a complete understanding of each individual thing that we're discussing. Everything, you know, what it is, you understand what it is without it having to have a noise associated with it.
- [123:23]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean, I guess the cyber security implications are significant. If you are giving direct access to other people to transmit signals to your brain in a high bandwidth way that is not just words kind of that it's almost like you heard them even though there is no sound in your ear. But if it's like actually directly kind of interfacing in a high bandwidth way
- [123:46]
Joe Rogan
with your neural network also encryption's out the window. If we no longer have encryption, if we get to the point where.
- [123:54]
Lex Fridman
Why is that out of the window?
- [123:55]
Joe Rogan
Because if computing gets to the point where the bottleneck is like, think about money, right? What is money Right now money's all ones and zero somewhere essentially, right? It's all bank accounts. It's like, it's like, it's. We're not on a gold standard anymore. So what if that bottleneck, it's, it's an information bottleneck. Like someone's preventing you from going to, going into these places and getting these ones and zeros and transferring it to your place. But what if that is all? If, what if computing power gets to the point with AI gets to the point where that those boundaries are nonsense. Now all, all encryption is instantaneously decoded.
- [124:35]
Lex Fridman
I think probably cryptography is defense dominant in the limit. I think, like if you imagine mature technology, I think it would be possible to encrypt. I mean, if nothing else, you could use like a one time pad, which would enable you to encrypt things in a way that is unbreakable, really.
- [124:59]
Joe Rogan
I feel like that's going to be a bottleneck. And I think once we start reading each other's minds, that might Be the first thing to go. Well, it'll be like the ultimate social.
- [125:07]
Lex Fridman
That's where you really probably would want encryption. Right. If you're going to transmit thoughts to me.
- [125:12]
Joe Rogan
Oh yeah.
- [125:12]
Lex Fridman
Like you don't, you don't want sort of have.
- [125:14]
Joe Rogan
Oh, you don't want some asshole constantly in your head, your next door neighbor just poking you and prodding you.
- [125:20]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [125:20]
Joe Rogan
But you as well, you would hope that along with this technology becomes like a general state of enlightenment that the human beings achieve, where that's no longer the kind of behavior that we indulge in.
- [125:33]
Lex Fridman
Which behavior do we no longer indulge?
- [125:35]
Joe Rogan
Annoying each other, annoying each other, stealing each other's money, that kind of stuff.
- [125:39]
Lex Fridman
Well, but then, yeah, I guess it goes back to this question of the utopian condition. So there are a lot of things that individually are bad, like lying, stealing, cheating, greed, excessive pride, like all kinds of disease, stubbing your knees bad. Yet if you sort of imagine removing all of those things, then that changes the human condition quite profoundly. And to some people would feel kind of maybe, or appear flavorless or sort of. If there is no tension, no conflict, no bruised ego, no like. But it might still be good. But it does force us to sort of. I think it would be a rather fundamentally different thing that we would be metamorphosing into if we went all the way in that direction, which ultimately might be right. But it would require us to kind of find new ways of realizing whatever values are imperfectly realized in the current world through conflict and competition and pain. Like some people get the motivation from painful failure. And so if you get rid of the pain from failure, then you'd need some other motivation, like some other thing that drives you on which there could be like maybe it's just a love of achievement and you feel kind of neutral or just less happy when you fail. But you would still need something that kind of preserves whatever structure it is that we think is valuable in the current human condition. Unless you go all the way to sort of radical hedonism and think the future is best if we were all just kind of floating in some kind of drug induced euphoria as blobs that experienced immense pleasure but had no real texture in our experiences, didn't engage in activities and didn't interact with each other. There's like a philosophical view where ultimately pleasure is the only thing that matters and the minimization of suffering. So if that's your axiology then, and it's relatively easy to see then how at technological maturity you would achieve A sort of optimal state. But if you have a more complex value system where maybe pleasure is one good thing, maybe really important, but there are also other things like appreciating beauty, true friendship, courage, achievement. And ideally you'd want a future that includes all of these things, then you need to do a little bit more design work to, to figure out a way to combine them all in a meaningful way.
- [128:07]
Joe Rogan
This all comes back to our idea of human meaning. What's important to humans, our finite 100 year lifespan adoption of this concept of meaning. But the black hole doesn't give a shit about human meaning. And it's going to be around a lot longer than us and it's got a lot more power than us and it's doing a lot more change than us. And we want to think that we're more important than black holes.
- [128:32]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean, because we are. I think we are. I mean to us. Yeah, to us, but to the universe.
- [128:39]
Joe Rogan
Is it, is human meaning that important to the universe or is it just sort of a placeholder for like what will ultimately become? Is it motivate us to continue to progress?
- [128:51]
Lex Fridman
Well, so I think like at technological maturity, there are certainly forms of purpose that you could have. You could have artificial purpose. So this is when you basically set yourself a goal for the sake of having the goal and then doing the activity that. So maybe you set yourself the goal. I'm going to get this little white ball into a sequence of 18 holes. And not only that, but in order to achieve this goal. It's part of the goal that I'm only allowed to use this very inconvenient method. I can hit the ball with a club, I can much easier to just pick it up and put it in each hole successively. But that doesn't count as being successful. So you could make up this goal pretty arbitrary. Now, once you have that goal, then you now have a reason to try hard, to concentrate, to perfect your swing and you can play golf. So the goal enables you to do this activity of golf playing which maybe you find fun or worthwhile or meaningful.
- [129:52]
Joe Rogan
And the reason why it's meaningful is because it's difficult to do.
- [129:56]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And so the future would consist, I think, if we succeed in a lot of game playing, and you could certainly have these artificial purposes that you set yourself these goals that then give you a reason to engage in an activity.
- [130:11]
Joe Rogan
Now we're back in the world of half life. Now we're back in a video game. Now we're also in the simulation. This is going to be your Artificial goal.
- [130:20]
Lex Fridman
And you could imagine, I think maybe we shouldn't think of video games here, but it could be much like games we can't even imagine. It could be society wide games that last for 20 years, that involve all kinds of multimodal things and little groups that work together to come up with new ways of creatively in that broad sense of things we do for their own sake. I think game playing could be. And it's like a lot of what children do, curiosity and spend a lot of their time playing games and we might all be like kids again. What might be in short of supply is natural purpose like purposes which we don't just arbitrarily make up in order to have a purpose, but that are sort of given to us. So right now in the world you might say making a living is not just an arbitrary purpose because there are real consequences if you fail. Like maybe eventually you get kicked out from your flat and then it's really cold and you get drained on and horrible things happen. So similarly, if you don't brush your teeth, eventually you will have tooth decay and there will be real consequences. So there are various things that you have reason to do because there are real negative consequences if you fail to do them. And a lot of our lives are structured by these natural purposes. At a societal level. There's a whole bunch of things we need to do together, right? In this future world, maybe there would be many fewer of those natural purposes because for any one of them you could just ask the AI to sort it out. And so the artificial purposes would be a larger chunk. It's interesting to think, are there any natural purposes that would survive to technological maturity? Like anything that we still have sort of instrumental reasons that we need to do ourselves? And I think there might be a few, but they are more subtle. They might not strike us currently as very important, but it's one of those things where like, you know that during the day if you're outside, you can't see the stars, right? It's not because they're not there. Like, it's because, like there's so much light that they are sort of blotted out. But at night, when the stronger light from the sun is absent, you can see these fainter lights. I think similarly in this future there might be, once these urgent screaming moral values of immediately pressing practical concern go away, you might be able to perceive a whole constellation of these more subtle values that we are blind to currently. So take the value of, I don't know, honoring your forebears so Right now it doesn't seem. I mean, maybe it's nice sometimes to remember your past parents or some historical hero who did something good that benefacted humanity. Right. But it's like not the main thing that you're like, maybe that would be a bigger thing if there was nothing else you needed to do. Maybe you could actually spend serious time or spiritual quests. Like even for people who are very religious, a lot of their actual waking hours are spent on random other things doing their laundry. Right. Like driving to work, like all kinds of stuff. Like if all of that was automated, you could imagine spending more time on trying to align yourself, orient yourself to this higher being and trying to be in communication with them. Like maybe aesthetic values, like there may be some things that would just be kind of nice and cool if the world were like that. We don't really have time to worry so much about them now. But if there was nothing else on the agenda, like coming together in a way that upholds some tradition in a beautiful original way that still is true to the original spirit, together with other people and enacting some ceremony, maybe those things would start to fill more of our time in conjunction with this game playing. And there might be many other of these kind of subtler values that would start to shape what people were doing.
- [134:27]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And ultimately, who knows?
- [134:31]
Lex Fridman
Yes.
- [134:33]
Joe Rogan
It's very interesting and it's very open ended and we really don't know what's going to happen, but we're probably going to see it. We're probably going to see the strangest thing that humans have ever had a possibility to experience.
- [134:47]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And in the end, I guess it's trustful.
- [134:49]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Well, I mean, these conversations are always fascinating. And who knows, let's do another one in a few years and see how off we are. If you come back in four years.
- [135:02]
Lex Fridman
All right, let's see if we have four years.
- [135:04]
Joe Rogan
If we have four years. If you can, if you're allowed to travel in four years, come back and let's see how wrong we were.
- [135:11]
Lex Fridman
We can update.
- [135:12]
Joe Rogan
Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you coming in here. It's great to see you again. It's always fun. Okay. All right, think about it, kids. Bye, everybody.