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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Max Tegmark: Life 3.0 (#115)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Physics, Natural Sciences, Science

4.71.1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2021

⏱️ 34 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Also on Youtube Max Tegmark is a physicist, cosmologist, and artificial intelligence - machine learning researcher. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute. He has been my mentor and friend for a LONG time :-) Professor Tegmark’s research is focused on precision cosmology, e.g., combining theoretical work with new measurements to place sharp constraints on cosmological models and their parameters. Early on, this challenge has lead him to work mainly on cosmology and quantum information. Although he’s continuing his cosmology work with the HERA collaboration, the main focus of his current research is on the physics of intelligence: using physics-based techniques to better understand biological and artificial intelligence (AI). Ultimately, this could culminate in what he calls an "AI Physicist" https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/01/1895/an-ai-physicist-can-derive-the-natural-laws-of-imagined-universes/ A native of Stockholm, Tegmark left Sweden in 1990 after receiving his B.Sc. in Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology (& a B.A. in Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics). His first academic venture beyond Scandinavia brought him to California, where he studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his PhD. in 1994. Tegmark is an author on more than 200 technical papers, and has been featured in dozens of science documentaries. He has received numerous awards for his research, including a Packard Fellowship (2001-06), Cottrell Scholar Award, an NSF Career grant. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.” His book "LIFE 3.0" was an instant New York Times Best Seller and one of Mark Cuban and Barack Obama's favorite books of 2017. Life 3.0 asks the question: "How will Artificial Intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human?" The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology—and there’s nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark. How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today’s kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle? Read Life 3.0 https://amzn.to/2YTDg9L 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:09 Disagreement with Noam Chomsky and the challenge of the Imitation Game 00:04:16 Will AI exceed human intelligence? 00:07:04 Should we fear AI? Are we being to passive? 00:09:02 Should we trust AI? What we should worry about. 00:11:21 Were you born tooearly to make good use of AI? Could AI avert war? 00:12:45 AI may have a democratizing impact. 00:17:55 The "Improve The News" experiment 00:26:19 What do you think about exponential change? Will tech solve humanity's problems? 00:30:31 What is your ethical will? 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📖 Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 📧Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 🎙️Listen on all other platforms: https://wavve.link/into A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

0:07.0

Everybody, this is such an incredible treat a thrill.

0:14.0

It's why I got into doing these pandemic

0:16.2

podcasts in the first place to be honest so that I could have

0:19.2

conversations with my buddies and friends and mentors and teachers and today it's none other than Professor

0:25.8

Max Tagmark of MIT who I've known for 25 years or something like that and it's really

0:32.4

been a huge influence on me. I've stayed in his house, I can't

0:36.7

believe it. I knew him when he had little babies and now they're all grown up and

0:41.9

he's known me since long before I had babies. Let's put it that way.

0:45.5

Max, how are you doing today? I'm doing great and it's so awesome to see you in these crazy times and

0:51.5

it's not just our kids that are growing up but that

0:55.3

universe behind you on the sofa our knowledge of it has grown up too I remember

1:00.1

when we first wrote a paper together on taking pictures of our baby pictures of our

1:05.6

universe, oh boy have the pictures gotten sharper and clearer since then, huh?

1:11.0

Yeah, and largely thanks to the work that you have put in in this cosmic

1:16.5

universe that we inhabit and I just find it so amazing to keep up with the things that you're doing. I associate kind of the output of someone

1:25.6

like you with a very young, you know, starting out, wanting to get a job, wanting to get a new

1:30.1

career, and yet you're making so much new content and productivity and doing so many new creative ideas.

1:37.0

I first want to start with though something provocative perhaps and that is your neighbor.

1:42.0

Perhaps you checked first though and say that of course as usual you're being way too kind

1:47.0

talking about my contributions to making those universe pictures better when you were the one who was actually building experiments taking the photos.

1:55.0

We'll get into that.

...

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