#94 — Frontiers of Intelligence

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2017

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Max Tegmark about his new book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. They talk about the nature of intelligence, the risks of superhuman AI, a nonbiological definition of life, the substrate independence of minds, the relevance and irrelevance of consciousness for the future of AI, near-term breakthroughs in AI, and other topics.

SUBSCRIBE to listen to the rest of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast at samharris.org/subscribe.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
0:12.1	hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing
0:16.2	the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
0:20.7	Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed
0:26.1	to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads
0:31.2	on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:35.8	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
0:46.5	Today I am speaking with Max Tagmark once again. Max is a professor of physics at MIT,
0:52.8	and the co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, and has helped organize these really groundbreaking
0:59.3	conferences on AI. Max has been featured in dozens of science documentaries, and as I said,
1:06.3	he's been on the podcast once before. In this episode, we talk about his new book, Life 3.0,
1:13.0	Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. And we discuss the nature of intelligence,
1:19.0	the risks of superhuman AI, a non-biological definition of life that Max is working with,
1:27.2	the difference between hardware and software, and the resulting substrate independence of minds,
1:33.0	the relevance and irrelevance of consciousness for the future of AI, and the near-term promise
1:39.1	of artificial intelligence. All the good things that we hope will come from it soon.
1:44.7	And we touch other topics. And this is a conversation that Max calls the most important conversation we
1:51.2	can have. And I more or less agree, I would say that if it isn't now the most important conversation
1:58.7	we can have, it will one day be. And unlike most things, this topic is guaranteed to become more
2:08.3	and more relevant each day, unless we do something truly terrible to ourselves in the meantime.
2:13.1	So, if you want to know what the future of intelligent machines looks like, and perhaps the future
2:21.6	of intelligence itself, you can do a lot worse than read Max's book. And now I bring you Max Tecmark.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Waking Up with Sam Harris, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Waking Up with Sam Harris and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.