Sam Harris speaks with Richard Dawkins at a live event in Los Angeles (first of two). They cover religion, Jurassic Park, artificial intelligence, elitism, continuing human evolution, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
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| Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. | |
| This is Sam Harris. | |
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| On today's podcast, I'll be playing the audio from the first of two live events I did with Richard Dawkins in Los Angeles last month. | |
| These were fundraisers for his foundation, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, which is also in the process of merging with the Center for Inquiry. | |
| Making them the largest foundation for defending science and secularism from politically weaponized religion. | |
| Their work is suddenly even more relevant in the U.S. | |
| because although Trump himself isn't a religious demagogue, he's promised to appoint a few to the Supreme Court. | |
| And he's also put a creationist in charge of the Department of Energy. | |
| Which both stewards our nuclear weapons and funds more basic science research than any other branch of government. | |
| So now we have Rick Perry in charge of all that. | |
| His immediate predecessors were each physicists. | |
| One was a Nobel laureate. | |
| And Perry is a man who, I would be willing to bet my life, couldn't utter three coherent sentences on the topic of energy as a scientific concept. | |
| So, I would urge you to become a member of CFI or the Richard Dawkins Foundation. | |
| One membership now covers both organizations. | |
| And once you are a member, you'll occasionally receive action alerts requesting that you contact your elected representatives on matters of public policy. | |
| As many have noted, non-believers are somewhere between 10 and 20, 25 percent of the U.S. | |
| population. | |
| It's hard to know for sure, but we almost certainly outnumber many other subgroups in the U.S., and we are disproportionately well-educated, needless to say, and yet we have almost no political power. | |
| Right, now this will only change once we make ourselves heard. | |
| So Richard was doing a speaking tour to raise funds for his foundation and for CFI, and he asked me to join him at one of these events. | |
| And our event in LA sold out almost immediately. | |
| And so we booked the hall for a second night, and that sold out too. | |
| And I'll bring you the audio from that second event in a later podcast. | |
| But as you'll hear, we had a lot of fun, and it was a great crowd, and it was really satisfying to have a conversation like this live, as opposed to privately over Skype. | |
| So, as I'll say at the end, this has given me an idea for how to produce some more podcasts like that. | |
| And now I give you An Evening with Richard Dawkins, The First Knight. | |
| Thank you all for coming. | |
| This is really, it's an honor to be here, and it really is an honor to be here with you, Richard. | |
| I get to return the favor. | |
| He had me at Oxford, I think, five years ago. | |
| So welcome to Los Angeles. | |
| So I'm going to, this is going to be very much a conversation, but what I did, I was worried about this, I wasn't worried about tonight, I was worried about tomorrow night. | |
| My fear was that Richard and I would have a scintillating conversation tonight, and then tomorrow night try doggedly to recapitulate it word for word, and yet feign spontaneity, and if you know my position online, you know, that doesn't work. | |
| So what I did is I went out to all of you asking for questions, and I got thousands. | |
| And so I picked among what looked promising. | |
| So I can guarantee that the two nights will be reasonably different, because different questions will come up. | |
| But we won't hew too narrowly to the questions. | |
| We'll just have a conversation. | |
| But as we come out here, I find that I want to ask you, Richard, about your socks. | |
| I'm not sure what the question is. | |
| I've just come from Las Vegas, the conference of PsyCon. | |
| And one of the things we had was a workshop on cold reading, which is the technique whereby so-called mentalists are supposed to read each other's thoughts. | |
| And what they're really doing is just simply looking at the clothes and the general appearance and assessing it. | |
| And we had to pair off for this workshop. | |
| And I was with a nice young woman, and we sort of sized each other up. | |
| And I said to her, I think I'm getting that you come from somewhere in the west of the States. | |
| I think maybe, maybe not California, maybe a bit further north. | |
| And of course, I was simply reading her label, which said she came from Oregon. | |
| And then she summed me up when she said, I think you may have some problem with your eyes. | |
| maybe colorblind I I'm serious about this I'm trying to spread a meme for wearing odd socks. | |
| There's a kind of tyranny of forcing us to buy socks in pairs. | |
| Shoes have chirality. | |
| Left shoe and right shoe are not interchangeable. | |
| But socks don't. | |
| When you lose one of a pair of socks, you're forced to throw the other one away. | |
| It's absurd. | |
| So what I want... Although, honestly, Richard, you just told me a story that suggests that shoes are interchangeable. | |
| Oh, my God. | |
| That's right. | |
| That's rather an embarrassing story. | |
| Someone is going to find the relevant video on the Internet. | |
| I will tell the story. | |
| Now you've let the cat out of the bag. | |
| I was doing a television film called Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life. | |
| And in the death episode, we were talking about suicide, and there's a famous suicide spot. | |
| It's a bit like San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, where people have famously jumped to their death. | |
| And all around this place, Beachy Head is a very, very high cliff in the south of England. | |
| There are rather sad little crosses where people have jumped off. | |
| And we were filming the sequence on suicide, and I had to walk very solemnly and slowly and in a melancholy frame of mind past these crosses. | |
| And the camera was focused on my feet, walking past these little low crosses. | |
| And I felt incredibly uncomfortable. | |
| I had this sort of uncanny feeling of being uncomfortable, and I couldn't understand why. | |
| And then eventually, it was my feet that were uncomfortable, walking past these crosses. | |
| And eventually the director called cut, and we went off, and I took my shoes off, because they were so painful. | |
| And only then did I realize I'd put them on the wrong way round. | |
| So this is preserved for posterity in close-up. | |
| I want to see that video. | |
| Someone find that video. | |
| The weird thing is, none of the television audience ever wrote in to complain about this. | |
| So maybe this at least will raise their attention. | |
| So the first question, Richard, which I thought could provoke some interesting reflection is, why do you both court so much controversy? | |
| No, we don't, do we? | |
| We don't court it, it pursues us. | |
| I think, I mean, what I've noticed is that there are undoubtedly people who are friends of ours, colleagues of ours, who agree with us down the line, who seem to feel no temptation to pick all of the individual battles we pick. | |
| And one doesn't have to be a coward not to want to fight all of these culture war battles, although it helps. | |
| But we have friends who are decidedly not cowards. | |
| Someone like Steve Pinker, he stakes out controversial positions, but he is not in the trenches in quite the same way as we are. | |
| And I'm wondering what you think about that. | |
| Did you see a choice for yourself? | |
| Do you find yourself revisiting this choice periodically? | |
| I think it's a perfectly respectable position to take, that a scientist has better things to do. | |
| And I don't take that position, and I think you don't either. | |
| I do think it's important to fight the good fight when we do have, when science, when reason has vocal and powerful and well-financed enemies. | |
| And so I'm not sure what particular battles the questioner has in mind when he says we caught controversy. | |
| But I suppose I believe so strongly in truth And if I see truth being actively threatened by competing ideologies which actually not only would fight for the opposite of truth but would indoctrinate children in the opposite of truth, I feel impelled to fight only verbally. | |
| I mean, I don't feel impelled to actually get a rifle or something. | |
| Well, there's time yet. | |
| So I guess the dogma that has convinced so many fellow scientists and intellectuals, academics, that there is no reason to fight, certainly one of those dogmas is Stephen Jay Gould's idea of NOMA, non-overlapping magisteria. | |
| It strikes me as a purely wrong-headed and destructive idea. | |
| Do you want to explain that to me? | |
| I think so. | |
| I think we probably agree about that. | |
| Non-overlapping magisteria. | |
| He wrote a book called, what was it again called? | |
| The Rock of Ages? | |
| The Rock of Ages, that's right. | |
| So science has the age of the rocks and religion has the rock of ages. | |
| And the idea was that science and religion both have their legitimate territories, which they shouldn't Pinge upon each other. | |
| Science has the truth about the real world, that's sciences department. | |
| Religion has what he described as moral questions and I think deep questions of existence. | |
| Meaning and morality. | |
| Well I would strongly dispute the idea that we should get our morals from religion, For goodness sake, let's... Whatever else we get our morals from, it must not be religion. | |
| That would be... If you imagine what the world would be like if we actually did get our morals from the Bible or the Koran, it would be totally appalling. | |
| And was appalling. | |
| In the time when we did get from the Bible, it is now appalling in those countries where they get it from the Quran. | |
| So don't let's get our morals from religion. | |
| As for the deep fundamental questions, I take those to be things like, where did the laws of physics come from? | |
| What is the origin of all things? | |
| What is the origin of the cosmos? | |
| What happened before the Big Bang? | |
| Those are scientific questions. | |
| It may be that science can never answer them, but if science cannot answer them, sure as hell religion can't answer them. | |
| I don't actually think anything can answer them if science can't. | |
| It's an open question whether things like the origin of the physical constants, those numbers which physicists can measure but can't explain, the origin of the laws of physics, whether those will ever be explained by science, if they are well and good, If they're not, then nothing will explain them. | |
| The idea, I mean, Steve Gould was careful to say that these separate magisteria must not encroach on each other's territory, and so the moment religion encroaches on science's territory, for example in the case of miracles, then it's fair game for scientific criticism. | |
| But my feeling about that is that if you take away the miracles from religion, you've taken away most of why people believe in them. | |
| People believe in the supernatural because they believe... | |
| Biblical or Quranic stories which suggest that there have been supernatural miracles, and if you deprive them of that, then they've lost everything. | |
| To take Christianity as only one example, that has been spelled out in every generation. | |
| I mean, starting with Paul, he said, you know, if Christ be not risen, your faith is vain. | |
| Yeah, exactly, yes. | |
| Or something close to that. | |
| So it's, you can't, you can't get around the fact that religious people care About what's true, and they purport to be making claims, truth claims, about the nature of reality. | |
| They think certain historical figures actually existed, some of them maybe coming back. | |
| Yes, virgin birth. | |
| Books, you know, issued occasionally from a divine intelligence, and so there's just no way to... I never met Gould, but I just can't... | |
| No, I agree. | |
| It's become very fashionable among the scientific establishment. | |
| It was more or less endorsed by the U.S. | |
| National Academy of Sciences. | |
| As for the separation, as for the idea that religion doesn't stray into science's territory, imagine the following scenario. | |
| Imagine that Some sort of scientific evidence, perhaps DNA evidence, were discovered, perhaps somewhere in a cave in Palestine, and it was demonstrated that, say, Jesus never had a father. | |
| I mean, it's inconceivable how that could happen. | |
| Just suppose it was. | |
| Suppose there was scientific evidence. | |
| Can you imagine theologians saying, oh, that's science. | |
| That's not our department. | |
| We're not going to... They would love it. | |
| It would be meat and drink to them. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Many people who are not atheists believe that your efforts against religion are wasted, and that the net result of your work is to simply offend religious people. | |
| There's a widespread myth that people can't be reasoned out of their faith. | |
| Please talk about this. | |
| It's just uncanny that there are the most memorable quips and quotes and phrases. | |
| Anything that is aphoristic seems to have undue influence on our thinking. | |
| And there's this aphorism that is usually attributed to Swift, I think he says something like it. | |
| It's not quite the version that has been passed down to us, but this idea that you can't reason someone out of a view that he wasn't reasoned into. | |
| And this just strikes the mind of Homo sapiens as so obviously true, and if you look at my inbox, it is so obviously false. | |
| So, tell me about your experience reasoning with your readers. | |
| I think it would be terribly pessimistic to think that you cannot reason. | |
| I mean, I think I'd just give up, probably die, if I thought I couldn't reason people out of their silliness. | |
| I would accept, would you agree with this, that there are some people who Demonstrably do know all the evidence and even understand the evidence, but yet still persist in. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, so there's, there'll be a couple of questions that will bring us onto that territory because there's more. | |
| To reason about than science has tended to allow, or that secular culture has tended to allow. | |
| So people have these intense transformative experiences, or they have these hopes and fears that aren't captured by you saying, don't you understand the evidence for evolution? | |
| But this is more of a conversation that people don't tend to have. | |
| But yeah, I would agree that people certainly resist Conclusions that they don't like the taste of. | |
| I can think of two examples. | |
| One I mentioned in the reception beforehand. | |
| A professor of astronomy, somewhere in America, who writes papers, mathematical papers, in astronomical journals, in which his mathematics, his mathematical ideas, accept that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and yet he privately believes it's 6,000 years old. | |
| So, here is a man who knows his physics, he knows his astronomy, he knows the evidence that the universe is 13 billion years old. | |
| And yet, so split-brained is he, that he actually privately departs from everything in his professional life. | |
| Well, surely we have to accept that he, I don't know, cannot be reasoned out, but I mean, He already knows the evidence and will not be reasoned out of his foolishness. | |
| Yeah, I didn't say that you could always succeed, but I think, and clearly there are, and I have this bias as you do, that if the conversation could just proceed long enough, the ground for science would continually be conquered and it never gets reversed. | |
| And it is being and will be. | |
| Yeah, and you never see the, I mean, this is a unidirectional conquest of territory, so you never see A point about which science was once the authority, but now the best answer is religious. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | |
| Right? | |
| But you always see the reverse of that, and that's... And actually, most scientists who call themselves religious, if you actually probe them, I mean, they don't believe really stupid things like six-day creation and things. | |
| Most of them don't. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Although, I find that Christian scientists Not Christian scientists, as in the cult, but scientists who happen to be Christian, believe much more than your average rabbi. | |
| This is a way... That's true. | |
| Christianity and Muslim scientists, no doubt, return the favor. | |
| I get the feeling your average rabbi, like your average chaplain of an Oxford college, doesn't actually believe in God at all. | |
| I've met that rabbi. | |
| So, there's a couple of fun questions here that I just wanted to hear Richard react to. | |
| Are there any biological extinctions that you would consider virtuous? | |
| For instance, should we eradicate the mosquito? | |
| You have 10 seconds to decide. | |
| It would have to be more than one mosquito. | |
| There's the malaria mosquito, the yellow fever mosquito. | |
| Yeah, all mosquitoes. | |
| Mosquitoes are unbelievably beautiful creatures. | |
| That's the most irrational thing ever. | |
| The great expert on fleas. | |
| And she presented the Department of Zoology in Oxford with a gigantic blown up photograph of a mosquito. | |
| And it was a fantastic piece of work of art. | |
| By a malevolent God. | |
| Yes. | |
| If ever there were proof of God's malevolence, it's got to be the mosquito. | |
| I have no hesitation in killing individual mosquitoes. | |
| But wouldn't you want to be a little more efficient than that with CRISPR or something? | |
| I haven't thought about it before. | |
| I think I would not wish to Can I throw a little more on the balance? | |
| We've had, reliably, year after year, two million people killed by mosquito-borne illness. | |
| Now it's cut down to, I think, 800,000, so we're making progress with bed nets. | |
| For some reason, I find myself less reluctant to extinguish the malarial parasite that the mosquito bears, but that's probably not very logical. | |
| I mean, we have extinguished the smallpox virus. | |
| Right. | |
| Except for a few lab cultures. | |
| Yes, and then like geniuses, then we tell people how to synthesize it online. | |
| So the flip side of that, of course, is the Jurassic Park question. | |
| Should we reboot the T-Rex? | |
| - Yes. - If we have, yes. - That's fantastic. - I wish, I wish, I mean, I thought the Jurassic Park method of doing it was incredibly ingenious and I loved that. | |
| What was not ingenious was the ludicrous injection of, was it chaos theory or one of those nine days wonder fashionable things? | |
| I don't remember. | |
| But the idea of getting mosquitoes in amber And extracting DNA and reconstructing dinosaurs, that's an amazingly good science fiction idea. | |
| If only it were possible. | |
| Unfortunately, the DNA is too old for that to happen. | |
| If it were, I would definitely wish to see that done. | |
| What could go wrong? | |
| Richard seems to want to live in a maximally dangerous world, filled with mosquitoes and T-Rexes. | |
| So now, you and I were speaking about your books. | |
| You've written some very important books on 10 years apart, and so you have an anniversary this year of the Selfish Gene, which is the 40th. | |
| And the Blind Watchmaker has its 30th anniversary. | |
| And Climbing Mount Improbable is the 20th, and then The God Delusion is the 10th. | |
| So actually, I wanted to give you a chance to talk about the titles of the first two. | |
| The Selfish Gene has provoked an inordinate amount of confusion, and the Blind Watchmaker is a phrase that is useful to understand. | |
| So do you want to talk about that? | |
| Yes, The Selfish Gene is misunderstood, I think, mostly by those who have read it by title only. | |
| only, as opposed to the rather substantial footnote to the title, which is the book itself. | |
| It could equally well have been called the altruistic individual because one of the main messages of the book is that selfish genes give rise to altruistic individuals. | |
| So it is mostly a book about altruism, mostly a book about the opposite of selfishness. | |
| So it certainly should not be misunderstood as advocating selfishness or saying that we are, as a matter of fact, always selfish. | |
| All it really means is that natural selection works at the level of the gene as opposed to any other level in the hierarchy of life. | |
| So genes that work for their own survival are the ones that survive, tautologically enough, And they are the ones that build bodies. | |
| So we, all of us, contain genes that are very, very good at surviving. | |
| Because they've come down through countless generations. | |
| And they are copied accurately, with very high fidelity, from generation to generation. | |
| Such that there are genes in you that have been around for hundreds of millions of years. | |
| And that's not true of anything else in the hierarchy of life. | |
| individuals die. | |
| They survive only as a means to the end of propagating the genes that built them. | |
| So individual bodies, organisms, should be seen as vehicles, machines, built by the genes that ride inside them for passing on those very same genes. | |
| And it is the potential eternal long-livedness of genes that makes them the unit of selection. | |
| So that's really the meaning of the selfish gene. | |
| As I say, the book could have been called The Altruistic Individual. | |
| It could have been called The Cooperative Gene for another reason. | |
| It could have been called The Immortal Gene, which is a more sort of Carl Sagan-esque title. | |
| It's a more poetic title. | |
| And in some ways I rather regret not calling it The Immortal Gene. | |
| But anyway, I'm stuck with it now. | |
| There's a common misunderstanding of evolution that leads people to believe that absolutely everything about us must have been selected for, otherwise it wouldn't exist. | |
| So people ask about what's the evolutionary rationale for post-traumatic stress disorder or depression. | |
| I'm not saying that there is no conceivable one, but it need not be the case that everything we notice about ourselves I mean, I'm actually a bit of an outlier here. | |
| I mean, I'm about as close as biologists come to accepting what you've described as a misconception. | |
| Because I do think that selection is incredibly powerful. | |
| And mathematical models show this. | |
| J.B.S. | |
| Haldane, one of the three founding fathers of population genetics, did theoretical calculation in which he postulated an extremely trivial character. | |
| He didn't mention it, but it might have been eyebrows. | |
| Suppose you believe that eyebrows have been selected because they stop sweat running down your forehead into your eyes. | |
| And it sort of sounds totally trivial. | |
| How could that possibly save a life? | |
| Until you realize, the first thing you might realize is that it could save your life if you were about to be attacked by a lion. | |
| And just a slight split second difference in how quickly you see the lion because you've got sweat in your eyes. | |
| Since the invention of sunblock, I think that's undoubtedly true. | |
| Yeah, okay. | |
| But Haldane actually did a mathematical calculation. | |
| He said, let us postulate a character so trivial that the difference between an individual who has it and an individual who doesn't have it is only one in a thousand. | |
| That's to say for every thousand individuals who have this, say the eyebrows and survive, 999 who don't have it survive. | |
| So from any actuarial point of view, a life insurance calculator would say, "Well, that's totally trivial." But it's not trivial when you think that the genes concerned is represented in thousands of individuals in the population and through thousands of generations. | |
| That multiplies up the odds. | |
| And Haldane's calculation was that if you postulate that one in the thousand advantage, he then worked out how long would it take for the gene to spread from being, I forget exactly the figures, but say 1% of the population up to 50% of the population. | |
| And it was a number of generations so short that it would be negligible on the geological timescale. | |
| So it would appear to be an instantaneous piece of evolutionary change, even though the selection pressure was trivial. | |
| Well, actually, selection pressures in the wild, when they've been measured, have been far, far stronger than that. | |
| But there's another way of approaching the question you raise when you say something like selective advantage in various psychological diseases or something like that. | |
| It may be that you're asking the wrong question. | |
| It may be that by focusing on the particular characteristic which you asked the question about, you're ignoring the fact that there's something associated with that. | |
| Let me think of an example. | |
| You know that at night, if you've got a lamp outside, or a candle is better, if you've got a candle, insects, moths, say, come and sort of, as it were, commit suicide. | |
| I mean, they just burn themselves up in the candle. | |
| And you could ask the question, what on earth is the survival value of suicidal self-immolation behavior in moths? | |
| Well, it's the wrong question, because a probable explanation for it is that many insects use a light compass to steer a straight line. | |
| Lights at night, until humans came along and invented candles, lights at night were always at optical infinity. | |
| They were things like the moon, the stars, or the sun during the day. | |
| And if you maintain a fixed angle relative to these rays that are coming from optical infinity, Then you just cruise at a straight line, which is just what you want to do. | |
| A candle is not an optical infinity, and if you work out mathematically what happens if you maintain a fixed acute angle to the rays that are emanating in all directions out of a candle, you perform a neat logarithmic spiral into the candle flame. | |
| So, this is an accidental by-product of a mechanism which really does have survival value. | |
| You have to rephrase the question, what is the survival value of maintaining a fixed angle at light rays? | |
| And then you've got the answer. | |
| So, to ask the question, what's the advantage of suicidal self-immolation, you've shifted to the wrong question. | |
| Right. | |
| And there are related issues, so there are things which provide some survival advantage in, if you have one copy of the gene, but if you have both copies, then it's deleterious. | |
| Yes, like sickle cell anemia. | |
| Right, right. | |
| So, what do you do with the concept of a spandrel, though? | |
| Gould's concept of a spandrel, is that useful to think about? | |
| Yeah, okay, yes. | |
| A spandrel, though, Lewontin and Gould wrote a notorious and overrated paper in 1979 in which Gould went to King's College, Cambridge, where there's the most beautiful, the most beautiful building, and the | |
| The Gothic arches inevitably form gaps which are called spandrels, and they actually have a name, and they're often filled with ornamentation. | |
| And the spandrels themselves are accidental by-products of something which really matters, which is the Gothic arch. | |
| The point they were making is that things that we... It's really almost the same point that I was making just now about asking the wrong question. | |
| Right. | |
| Spandrels are... You can't ask, what's the purpose of a spandrel? | |
| That's right, yes. | |
| It's a derivative of the thing you were building. | |
| Exactly, yes. | |
| What are your thoughts about artificial intelligence? | |
| Please discuss its relationship to biological evolution and how it could develop in the future. | |
| I think it's a question for you, Sam. | |
| Yes. | |
| I fear everyone's heard my thoughts on artificial intelligence. | |
| I find this increasingly interesting. | |
| It's something that I became interested in very late. | |
| And in fact, unless you were in the AI community until very recently, the dogma that had been exported from computer science to neuroscience and psychology and adjacent fields was that AI basically hadn't panned out. | |
| I mean, there was no real noticeable success there that should get anyone worried or particularly excited. | |
| Then all of a sudden people started making worried noises, and then there were obvious gains in narrow AI that were getting sexier and sexier. | |
| And now it was really the first time I thought about the implications of ongoing progress in building intelligent machines and progress at any rate. | |
| It really doesn't have to be that Moore's Law continues indefinitely. | |
| We just need to keep going and at a certain point we will find ourselves in the presence of machines that are as intelligent as we are. | |
| They may not be human-like, although presumably we'll build them to be as much like ourselves in all the good ways as possible. | |
| But this interests me for many different reasons, because, one, I'm actually worried in terms of existential risk, it's on my short list for things to actually worry about. | |
| But the flip side of that is that it's one of the most hopeful things. | |
| If anything seems intrinsically good, it's intelligence, and we want more of it. | |
| So insofar as it's reasonable to expect that we're going to make more and more progress automating things and building more intelligent systems, that seems very hopeful, and I think we can't but do it. | |
| And the other point of interest for me, and this is kind of my hobby horse, is that It's actually what we were talking about on stage last time some years ago when I wrote The Moral Landscape. | |
| I'm interested in collapsing this perceived distance between facts and values, the idea that morality somehow is uncoupled to the world of science and truth claims. | |
| And I think that once we have to start building, and we even have to start even now with things like self-driving cars, once we start building our ethics into machines that within their domain are more powerful than we are, the sense that there are no better and worse answers to ethical the sense that there are no better and worse answers to ethical questions, that we should all be moral relativists, that all cultures are equal with respect to what constitutes a good life, that just, I mean, there's going to be somebody sitting at the computer waiting to code something, and if you there's | |
| You've actually got to build in some moral values. | |
| You have to build in the values, and if you don't build it in, you're building in those values. | |
| So if you build a self-driving car that isn't distinguishing between people and mailboxes, well then you've built a very dangerous self-driving car. | |
| The more relevant tuning which people have to confront is, do you want a car That the car's going to have to make a choice between protecting the occupant and protecting pedestrians, say. | |
| So how much risk do you want as the driver of the car to assume in order to spare the lives of occupants? | |
| You're constantly facing a trolley problem, and you're the one to be sacrificed. | |
| And your point is that whereas trolley problems are these hypothetical things where you have to imagine you've got a runaway trolley and you're standing at points, And it's about to mow down five people. | |
| And if you pull the lever to swing the points, it'll kill one person. | |
| So you, holding the lever in your hand, have the dilemma, should I save five people and kill one? | |
| have the dilemma, should I save five people and kill one? | |
| But you know that by your action in pulling the lever, you're going to kill a person who wouldn't otherwise have died. | |
| But you know that by your action in pulling the lever, you're going to kill a person who wouldn't otherwise have died. | |
| And I think, Sam, you're making the point that AI, I mean, automatic machines, robotic machines, are going to need to have a moral system built into them so that the trolley problem is going to be faced by the programmer who's actually writing the software. | |
| Oh, it's already the case, yeah. | |
| Yes. | |
| And it just will proceed from there. | |
| So just imagine a system more intelligent than ourselves that we have seeded with our morality, And again, this is going to be a morality that the smartest people we can find doing this work will have to agree by some consensus is the wisest morality we've got. | |
| And so obviously the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are not going to get a vote in that particular project. | |
| At that first pass, All, everything you've heard about moral relativism just goes out the window, because we will be desperate to find the best answer we can find on every one of these questions, and desperate to build a machine that when it, in the real limit case where it begins to make changes to itself, It doesn't make changes that we find, in the worst case, incompatible with our survival. | |
| Making changes to itself is what more conventionally worries people. | |
| The von Neumann machine, which is capable of reproducing and thereby possibly evolving by natural selection and completely supplanting humans, completely taking over. | |
| This is, of course, a science fiction scenario. | |
| Not totally unrealistic. | |
| Not at all, given the fact that one path toward developing AI is to build... | |
| Genetic algorithms that function along similar lines. | |
| There's a Darwinian principle of just getting better and better in response to data and error correction and it may not even be clear how it has gotten better. | |
| So we could look forward to a time in the distant future when we have a hall like this filled with silicon and metal machines. | |
| Looking back and speculating on some far distant dawn age when the world was peopled by soft, squishy, organic, water-based life forms. | |
| But the data transfer would be instantaneous, so there'd be no reason to come out here. | |
| You'd just take the firmware upgrade. | |
| Maybe the world will be a better and a happier place. | |
| Well, my real fear is that it won't be illuminated by consciousness at all. | |
| Because I'm agnostic at the moment as to whether or not mere information processing and a scaling of intelligence by definition gets you consciousness. | |
| It may, in fact, be the case that it gets you consciousness. | |
| I'm not conscious, by the way. | |
| Yes, yes. | |
| It is a genuine, a very difficult philosophical problem, I think. | |
| Why, I mean, it would seem to be perfectly possible to build a machine or an animal or a human which can do all the things that we do, all the intelligent things that we do, all the life-saving things that we do, and yet not be conscious. | |
| And it's genuinely mysterious why we need to be conscious, I think. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I think it remains so. | |
| I think it's because consciousness is, the conscious part of you is generally the last to find out about what your mind just did. | |
| You know, you're not, you're playing catch-up. | |
| And what you call consciousness is, in every respect, an instance of some form of short-term memory. | |
| Now, there's different kinds of memory, and this is integrated in different ways, but there's just a transmission time for everything, so you can't be aware of a perception or a sensation the instant | |
| It hits your brain, because it's hitting your brain isn't one discrete moment, and so there's a whole time of integration, and so the present moment is this layered, subjectively speaking, it's this layering of memories, even when you are distinguishing the present from what you classically call a memory, and so it's not | |
| It is a genuine mystery why consciousness would be necessary. | |
| What couldn't a machine as complex as a human brain do but for the emergence of this subjective sense, this inner dimension of experience? | |
| I don't even know what the solution would look like and whether it would be solved by biologists or by philosophers or by computer scientists. | |
| Well, I'm just worried that, yeah, and that is, you've just articulated what philosophers call the horrid problem of consciousness. | |
| It's horrid as you can imagine. | |
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