SPEAKER: Tim.
Welcome to Google.
TIM URBAN: Thank you.
[LAUGH]
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER: On behalf of Google and all the Googlers
here and those streaming from around the world, welcome.
It's great to have you.
TIM URBAN: Thank you very much.
This is great.
I've wanted to do a Google Talk for a long time,
so this is very exciting.
SPEAKER: Great.
Because knowing that you were coming
and that you tend to get immersed in a talk, in a topic,
we wanted to get you a small token of our appreciation.
It's a book called "How Google Works."
[LAUGHTER]
And I think it's about as long as your posts
on superintelligence.
[LAUGHTER]
TIM URBAN: Oh, there's pictures.
SPEAKER: Oh, there are pictures.
All right.
I didn't think there was stick figures in there.
TIM URBAN: This is Eric Schmidt dancing.
[LAUGHTER]
Good.
This is exciting.
Thank you.
SPEAKER: So this talk was hosted for a group called
the Singularity Network.
And for a bit of background, it's
about a 2,000 Googler mailing list, which frequently
goes on 600 post tangents about what really means
strong, artificial intelligence, or whether your computer is
going to take over the world.
And I'm pretty sure thousands of hours of paid Google time
has been wasted on the page, looking for circularity
in the simulation argument or accurately grading
all of Ray Kurzweil's predictions,
or trying to see if the Chinese room really
could exist in China.
It's sort of a hub--
TIM URBAN: It's an anxious group of people.
[LAUGH]
SPEAKER: It is a hub for procrastination about topics
that I've heard that you're pretty interested in.
So we're really, really excited to have you.
TIM URBAN: Yes.
Well, great.
SPEAKER: So today, for today's presentation,
I want to talk about artificial intelligence and, you know,
how you came to understand it.
I mean, to start, I've love to hear
how you were introduced to the topic,
and why you really started digging it.
TIM URBAN: Yeah.
Well, it was kind of one of those things
that I kept hearing about.
And I kept hearing, like, smart people
I otherwise respected talking a lot about it.
It's like Burning Man, a little bit.
[LAUGHTER]
And I'd be like, really?
You're really talking about AI?
This was a few years ago.
Now, of course, I think more people
are aware that this is an important topic.
But I finally said, OK.
I need to figure out what's going on,
and whether this is exciting or scary or both or neither.
And so I started reading various kind of books out there.
I read Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence" book, which
is kind of one of the only books that's, like, simultaneously
riveting and, like, mind numbingly boring.
[LAUGHTER]
Like, it's an incredible feat that he's
accomplished with that book.
And I read a bunch of Kurzweil stuff
and, you know, I think some other kind of excited people
like Peter Diamandis.
And just, there's a crowd of people
that are very optimistic.
And then I read a bunch of other things, articles,
and watched nothing that fancy.
I read a bunch of PDFs that come out of universities.
I watched a bunch of YouTube videos.
And the way I do research is instead
of worrying about finding a professional source that's
definitely going to be the most legitimate, accurate source,
I just read and watch and take in, like,
a ton of stuff, most of which alone should not probably
be trusted.
But eventually, by the time you kind of get to the end,
you're like, OK.
I at least have a sense of what people are saying.
And with AI, there's not really any definitive source anyway.
And so I just did that for about a month.
Nothing too crazy.
And then I wrote kind of a big summary of what I had learned.
That was the beginning of me working
on trying to understand AI.
SPEAKER: Was there anyone you read that you were like, wow,
this guy is crazy?
TIM URBAN: Kurzweil's a little--
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, I'm hoping he's right.
I mean, according to him, I'm going to be able to switch
my senses on and off and to be in a true virtual-immersed
second reality, and we're going to replace my bloodstream with
something different, and--
SPEAKER: Nanobots.
TIM URBAN: What?
SPEAKER: Nanobots.
TIM URBAN: Yeah.
Oh, the nanobots, of course.
He lives with a lot of nanobots.
And we are going to be the AI.
We're going to merge with the AI.
We are going to be superintelligent ourselves.
And it's not just him.
I've heard a lot of people talk about that.
It sounds insane.
But then the people that are kind
of more the doomsday-type people, they also sound insane.
And I kept looking for someone who's like,
don't listen to any of these people.
It's just software.
Nothing crazy is going to happen.
It's going to get very intelligent.
Nothing that big or that life changing's going to happen.
And I didn't find anyone saying that.
So I said, OK.
So at this point, now I trust everyone.
Because there's just-- everyone sounds insane.
Clearly something weird's going to happen.
So, yeah.
I mean, as I said.
It's almost hard to find anyone who
really writes about AI that doesn't sound insane,
to be honest.
[LAUGH]
SPEAKER: So at Google, we have a few different ways
of developing machine intelligence.
I think neural nets is one of the most common here.
And when digging through your posts,
you mentioned three ways that we could potentially get AGI, ASI.
You talk about whole-brain emulation, genetic algorithms,
neural net inspired.
From your research, was there any
that you thought would be most likely to reach
artificial intelligence?
TIM URBAN: No.
I have no idea what I'm-- I have absolute--
I am not a good person-- and most people in this room have
a better idea.
Honestly my job is to figure out what people are saying.
And the thing is, for other topics
I've written about, I've written about Elon's companies
and cryonics, and other things, and I
feel more confident there, because there
was a lot more consensus.
And so I can basically read enough consensus,
and now I can take the conviction
that the thinkers have, and I can say,
now I can speak with that conviction.
So I can steal their conviction.
But when you read a bunch of things,
and experts are saying opposite things,
then I have no self-confidence now.
[LAUGHTER]
Right?
So it's like, if I at one point thought
that neural nets were an absolutely great way to do it,
I've now talked to three people who have said,
that is just absolute nonsense.
So now I don't want to say anything.
But in the last month, I've talked
to the head of a pretty respected AI company,
Vicarious.
And three or four other people, like, of the same-- MIRI.
I had a chance to talk to Luke Muehlhauser.
Muehlhauser, something.
Whatever.
Like, the smartest dude ever.
And someone who's working in open AI.
And you know, again, it's really, like, dramatically
differing opinions.
So then when I'm confused about something and I say,
I'm doing talks on AI-- and I don't
know what to say about this, because I now
have lost my conviction about whether or not that's actually,
like, objectively true.
And I ask them about it, and I think I get a clear answer,
and then I ask someone else, and it's something different.
So again, at this point, I'm excited.
Because I always think, like, if it's good,
if the good story comes true, of course that's exciting,
you know?
Everyone's happy about that.
We get to, like, slide down rainbows
and we get to-- we don't have to die,
and all the problems are solved.
And the bad story, I'm a little like,
it's kind of cool to be here for the apocalypse.
[LAUGHTER]
Right?
At least it's like, it's kind of awesome to see it happen.
So I'm kind of like, OK.
If AI kills all of us, then at least that's interesting.
And selfishly, I'm already kind of like, then,
I'll probably be kind of older.
Like, life isn't that fun anymore at that point.
[LAUGHTER]
And for people who are babies now, that's a little less fun.
SPEAKER: So you're sort of hinting
at the idea of an intelligence explosion.
TIM URBAN: Yes.
SPEAKER: And this is something I think
Kurzweil and Bostrom both relatively think
is very possible.
You talked about death and living forever.
Why does this intelligence explosion lead to that?
TIM URBAN: Because-- so I always like to,
as just an illustrative tool, draw intelligence staircase.
Which is not, of course, scientific,
but there is a scale of intelligence.
And so an ant has less cognitive ability
than a chicken who has less than an ape or a chimp, who
has less than we do.
And so the thing that blows my mind about that
is that we're not at the end of evolution.
We didn't, like, the finish button.
Like, we're in the middle of evolution.
And you know, whether evolution itself
is no longer the thing that will create higher intelligence-- it
could have been that for 3.8 billion years,
evolution was the thing.
And literally in our lifetimes, that changes.
And now biology building artificial intelligence
becomes the new thing.
And self-improving AI becomes the new way
that the smartest thing on the planet gets smarter.
Regardless whatever the mode is, the fact that the concept
of something that is as smarter than we are--
as smarter than we are, as we are than chimps--
[LAUGH]
--not well articulated.
You know what I'm saying though-- is just
so crazy to me.
Like, a chimp is really intelligent.
We're, like, almost identical DNA.
I mean, that is so incredibly close.
If there was an alien from some other dimension that
was assessing life on Earth, and they saw a chimp and a human,
they would say, these are essentially the same species,
as far as we're concerned.
And yet, not only could a chimp not
build a skyscraper or an airplane.
When a chimp sees something like that,
it just assumes it's part of nature.
It can't even understand that we built that.
You couldn't even explain to the chimp that that's not a bird.
That's something we made, that airplane.
So then I think something that's equally smarter than us,
and that's just a little bit, not only could we
not do what it can do.
Not only can we not understand what it can understand.
We can't even get that it built that.
Like, it can try to explain it to us all at once,
and we won't be able to grasp what
it's trying to explain to us.
That to me is so crazy.
And so that's a little bit above us.
Of course, how smart is that thing?
If you talk about a human level AGI that's coding itself,
it's a computer scientist, and it's about as intelligent
as we are.
But you know, it's a really good computer scientist,
like many humans.
Then it gets to that level where it
can do stuff we can't even understand that it did.
How good a computer scientist is that?
I mean, it's going to be able to build things and prove itself
so dramatically quickly in a way that we literally won't even
be able to understand.
Now that itself-- so that, of course,
leads to an insane intelligence explosion.
I always talk about how we have words for stupid.
We say 85 IQ, we would call stupid.
And 140 IQ, we call really smart.
But what if something has a 14,000 IQ?
We can't even begin to understand
what that means on Earth.
Species that are more intelligent have power.
Our higher intelligence gives us power
over every single species that's less intelligent than we are.
Even something as smart as chimps,
we can just put them in a cage.
What are you going to do?
[LAUGHTER]
We have tasers.
Good luck with that, chimp.
We can poison its food.
We have endless, endless tranquilizers.
We have endless ways to just completely own them
in every way that a species can be owned.
And so if you just continue to extrapolate that,
well, intelligence equals power.
When something is so dramatically more intelligent,
then we have to assume it's more powerful.
In which case, everything we attribute to God, God's power--
you know, we look at books like the Bible,
I mean, well, that kind of power is actually potentially real
when something gets more intelligent.
And then this is where, of course,
I have to drop in that, well, but I've also
heard this thing, which an example here is,
this is something I've seen people on both sides of,
and I'm constantly going back and forth myself.
But what I just said about something
a little more intelligent than we are,
not only can we not do what it can do.
We can't even understand that it did it even if it
tried to explain it to us.
I've heard people argue that that's not true.
I think there's a book by David Deutsch, I've heard.
And Elon Musk thinks this, and a few other people
that-- actually, that's not true that we are, at this point,
computers.
We're weak computers, but we're computers.
And once you're a computer, nothing
is not explainable to us.
There's no such thing as something
that we couldn't understand.
It's not an analogy.
We've crossed some magical black and white line
that we are now on this other side
where that'll never happen.
And that we are conscious, and that things-- once we're
conscious, there's nothing that is
an equivalent of us to animals.
Again, these are super smart people who believe this.
And I've heard a lot of people who
do believe this kind of thing.
To me, that sounds insane just because biology
isn't black and white.
We're in the middle of evolution.
To me, what we call consciousness
is just what it feels like to be human-level intelligent.
And if something were more intelligent,
they would have a consciousness that's
a different nature, that we don't even begin to understand,
that we can't grasp.
That's how I see it.
But again, there's 20 of these where
it's like a fundamental disagreement in the tech
community and in the philosopher communities
about this kind of thing.
So it's hard to say.
It's hard to even imagine what that thing more
intelligent than us would be like.
SPEAKER: It's really hard to imagine what it would be like,
and it's even more hard to imagine what it's going to do.
And so I think most of us are probably
familiar with the paperclip argument and the idea
of anthropomorphization.
Could you talk a little about AI motivation and sort
of what you wrote about that?
TIM URBAN: Yeah.
Well, a lot of what I wrote about it
came from Nick Bostrom's thinking,
because it just made a lot of sense
that anthropomorphizing is a real amateur error when you're
thinking about this stuff.
And if you made a spider superintelligent,
bad, bad times for everyone.
[LAUGHTER]
But it's not going to suddenly be Mr. Rogers,
and want to be kind and thoughtful and empathetic,
because it's still in its nature, in its DNA.
It's still a spider.
And so it's still going to want the kind of-- it's
going to have that core drive still in many ways.
It'll get more complex.
Maybe it'll develop some version of its own kind of empathy.
But to expect that it's going to have something similar to us,
our version of empathy and our values of valuing humans
in particular is very specific to our brains, which
evolved over a long period of time
to specifically be this way so we'd
be good tribe members in a human tribe
on the Earth in this period of time-- I mean,
it's really specific.
And to expect that even a spider-- which is biology,
so that still has a lot more in common with us.
To expect that even a different kind of biology
would end up there, end up anywhere
near the kind of specific values we
needed to have and the specific form of empathy
and understanding of life that we needed to have, is very low.
So then when you talk about something
that's not a human at all, I just
think it's crazy to assume it's going
to be empathetic and altruistic once it gets to that level,
because those are human brain hormonal things.
Those are not just automatic, when something gets powerful,
something gets intelligent, it's not automatic.
And so therefore, then you have the problem
of trying to program values.
And you have so many different problems of this.
One is if you had a good person, really nice,
good human from the year 900 try to program a superintelligent
being with knowing what's right and wrong, the thing would be,
like, tearing the skin off of infidels
of some kind that don't look like it, or whatever.
And they'd be thinking, I'm doing good.
I'm doing good for God.
I mean, it's really different.
We now would say, nope, nope.
Don't put that guy in charge of anything.
[LAUGHTER]
We have learned a lot.
We have a much more nuanced truth about humanity now,
and we are going to do it with our values.
But again, thinking just along the same kind of analogy,
there's a future that will look at us and just think, oh, man.
They are tribal.
They are animal.
These were really primitive people.
So it's hard for us to program anything in a permanent sense
right now, and assume that that's
going to be a good thing.
Secondly, if you ask 10 people on Earth right now,
OK, list what's right and wrong.
How should we program this thing?
You're going to get 10 different answers.
ISIS has a really good idea of what they think
the AI should be programmed as.
Not because-- you know, you can call them evil.
But really, they just think that they're
doing-- they think they know a right and wrong that we
don't understand.
So you have problems there.
Even if we all agreed, even if we were eternal
in our understanding, so nothing changed,
you have major problems.
Because you can't just program something to
do good, because we don't want the thing to do good.
We want the thing to do good for all things,
but humans for sure.
We don't want it to say, well, OK.
I'm going to do good now.
And look at all this beautiful life on the planet.
And, well, there's one species that's
killing a lot of the others.
Let's get rid of them.
[LAUGHTER]
We don't want that.
So we want it to do good kind of.
We wanted to also make sure it's, like,
being a selfish dick when it comes
to this species in relation to all the others, for example.
And then, of course, you know, again, we
have disagreements on Earth.
So it is just such a nightmare to even try
to figure out what we would want it to do
in a way we could all agree.
Then you have the problem of, you
can try to program something a certain way
and try to program something extremely nuanced
like human empathy, and hope that then
when it becomes dramatically powerful,
that what we think we did is actually
what will carry out into this now all-powerful being.
I think Bostrom and some others believe that the initial coding
will stick.
He says, it doesn't matter how smart a human gets.
A human still cares about self-preservation
and reproduction, and basic human things.
That's not going to change.
That's at our core, and everything that happens
comes down to that.
And so a lot of these thinkers believe
that even when something becomes superintelligent,
that those core goals and that core motivation
would still be what it is.
And we have to hope we get it right.
But then I've heard others that think,
that's not necessarily true.
We should not assume that something far more
intelligent than we are wouldn't begin
to change its own core makeup.
So again, this is when I kind of just go,
I'm happy this isn't my problem.
I'm happy that I am not one of the-- I
don't have to figure this out.
I get to sit back and watch the show, and kind of root
for one way.
Because it's just so incredibly daunting.
Not that people shouldn't be going for it.
I'm happy that other people are doing stuff like OpenAI.
Which, even that, I've heard people say,
that's the best thing that's ever happened.
And some other people say, that is the worst thing that
could possibly happen, that Elon and those others
are totally off base with that.
So it's hard to know anything.
But what I do know is that a lot more money and a lot more
resources and a lot more thinking
is currently going into AI development and then AI safety.
Because AI development's a lot more fun, exciting,
and profitable.
You're going to win glory with AI development,
not with AI safety.
And that's one thing when it's the American or other kind
of developed country companies working on it.
But what happens when we begin to get into an arms race
with it?
Even if we have good intentions, immediately, safety
goes out the door, and we start to think we have to win.
Because if we don't win, they're going to win.
And we'll take our chances with whatever we develop.
So an arms race is probably the worst thing that could happen.
And so, yeah.
Now I'm just like a crazy old man just, like,
going off on endless tangents.
Because this is-- but, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
SPEAKER: I want to talk a little about the reactions to those.
Because I knew the community around "Wait But Why"
is a really big thing.
I can see that your post was first on our LISTSERV
on February 11, 2015, which was about three weeks
after the first came out.
I'll show you the reactions later.
But how have people responded to your work on superintelligence?
TIM URBAN: You know, it's a range.
The people who don't know stuff like me, the people who
were like me before I started researching,
we're all just like, whoa.
I need to forward this to everyone.
I can't believe this.
The same exact reaction I had when I was reading this stuff.
And then among experts, I've gotten a few reactions.
There's someone being like, yes.
Finally, someone is saying this.
Well, everyone should read this.
And to the other side of the spectrum being like,
no one should read this.
This is so misguided and full of errors.
And then there's somewhere in the middle, which
is the patting me on the head and being like, you know,
I wouldn't put my name on it, but yes.
This is fine for--
[LAUGHTER]
--the layman to read.
This will do the job fine.
Again, this is not to be taken that seriously.
But it ranges.
And I've gotten, again, I've gotten some people that are
experts that actually really think that it's a good thing
for a layman to read, and others that don't.
So I don't know.
I don't know.
But again, those people I'm talking about
are the tiny minority.
Most people were people like me that
were just totally introduced to this for the first time.
When they think of AI, they thought of "The Terminator."
I mean, it was really simple stuff.
Because what do we know about AI?
We know what movies tell us.
There's a million fiction movies about AI,
and that's what people base their info on.
And there's some stuff in those movies that is accurate
or that is at least based in science,
and other stuff that's totally not.
And so I think for that reason alone,
just to introduce this to people,
to correct some simple misconceptions,
like the concept that, you know, AI is anthropomorphic.
And to understand that the danger isn't that the AI turns
on us because it wants power, because that's
anthropomorphizing, but that it builds a new beautiful house,
because that's what it's working on.
And oh, there's an ant hill underneath the house.
Not my problem, and that's where the ant hill is, so.
SPEAKER: So one of the people who's a fan of your work
is Elon Musk, like you mention.
Can you talk about working with Elon
and doing the intense four-page interview,
and are you ready to join his colony on Mars?
[LAUGHTER]
The metaphorical "Mayflower," I guess.
TIM URBAN: I would say there's a 70% chance that I step
on Mars at some point in life.
[LAUGHTER]
SPEAKER: Wow.
TIM URBAN: I think that's fair.
I think that's reasonable, the more you kind of learn
about where things are headed.
So that's exciting.
And I think there's even a higher chance
that I and most people in this room
end up in space at some point.
I think it's going to be very normal for humans
to go to space, to take their 9-year-old for his birthday
to space on these little space tourism things.
That's going to, I think, become pretty common,
and it's going to be really cool.
I saw something this morning tweeted
by one of the twin astronauts, one of those two.
I actually met one of them in person.
And I--
AUDIENCE: You did?
Which one?
TIM URBAN: I met Mark.
And I was like, I want to say that I was reading
all your tweets, and thank you for being out there for a year.
But maybe I should be talking to you about your wife's heroism,
because you're other one.
And so I just said, thank you for your service.
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, so he tweeted some thing about these balloons,
this company that has these huge balloons bringing things
into space.
It's going to be cool.
Again, very off topic.
So back to Elon.
Yeah.
Elon read the AI post, and I think a couple others,
and he tweeted a post or two.
And then, yeah.
And then his person got in touch and kind of said, you know,
he'd like to talk to you about maybe doing some writing stuff.
So I had, like, the most stressful phone
call of my life.
And I'm in my apartment, in my pajamas, on my headphones,
and just pacing around being like--
[LAUGHTER]
But we had a nice convo after the-- kind of say that we,
like-- he's super awkward.
I'm kind of awkward.
And so we had an awkward-off for the first five minutes.
[LAUGHTER]
An old Western awkward-off.
And I actually had a chance to talk to him many times.
And each time, we would begin with a five-minute old Western
awkward-off.
[LAUGHTER]
It takes some time to settle in.
And then I read Ashlee Vance's book,
and he said that, yes, for the first-- like,
after five minutes, he finally settles down.
And I was like, yes.
OK.
So it's not just me.
This is, like, his thing.
But, no.
It was really awesome to get to just
have a chance to talk to him.
And he's so not like he should be, given that he's Elon.
Like, he should be more reserved,
and he should just have a lot of-- certain kind of gravitas.
But he's not.
He just seems like he's someone who's never
changed from who he always was.
He'll talk to me on the phone like he'll
talk in an interview, like he'll talk to a press conference,
like he'll talk to some friends at SpaceX.
He just kind of is always who he is.
And right away, was just talking about all the things he
wishes people knew more about.
Why lowering the cost of space travel's
important and becoming a space-faring civilization.
Why ultimately Mars is not just a cool thing to do,
but really important.
Why electric vehicles and accelerating
the advent of sustainable energy is critically important.
And so it was the biggest no-brainer in history
to dedicate time to this.
It's a hero of mine who also is taking
on the most important issues with the raddest possible
companies.
Very obvious person to want to dedicate a lot of my time
to helping and working on it in any way I could.
So, yeah.
Then I had a chance to go out to the factories
and meet some of the different executives,
and really talk to them.
And there was a lot of trust.
We kind of had this agreement.
Because this is not, like, an old organization who just says,
well, this is how we do press here.
They kind of said, yeah.
Talk to people.
And they're not all press-approved,
so just let us know stuff they say, and make sure.
And it was great.
They basically told everyone, like, trust this guy.
Tell him whatever.
I don't know why, but they did.
[LAUGHTER]
And I honored that by-- I kept my journalistic integrity,
because I said I was publishing this on "Wait But Why,"
and I was going to be able to do it the way I wanted.
But I said, for quotes, I am happy to send them
to you, to let you see if you want them all in there.
Like, this is not some weird journal rules,
like, journalism rules that I just don't even
know what they are.
And I don't care.
Why have everything be so adversarial?
It's just like, sure.
Check them.
If you want to change your quote, like, you said.
If it's not what you want to say, like, say something else.
It's not like, ha!
That was the honest thing, and now you're lying.
You're still you saying stuff.
[LAUGHTER]
And the truth is, they changed almost nothing at all.
There was tiny little things like the bandwidth
of their satellite internet.
They didn't want their competitors-- I mean,
the tiniest thing.
So it was great.
It could not have been a more fun project.
It got totally out of hand, lengthwise.
It was a four-post, 95,000-word thing.
But yeah.
It could not have been more fun.
And I learned so much about all those industries,
about entrepreneurship, about how technology progresses
and moves in general.
I had to study the past a lot.
I had to study electrical, you know,
revolution in the 1880s and Henry Ford,
and everything he did.
And I understand how airplanes came about, and all that.
So it was just super fun.
And also, probably most importantly,
I got to examine how Elon thinks,
which is totally the secret.
I mean, I'm so convinced that he's smarter than everyone here
and richer and more ambitious and more insane,
harder working, all those things.
But honestly, if that was it, there would be more Elons.
I mean, it's his incredible ability
to really genuinely reason from first principles in almost
everything he does that's important.
That is a theme with all those icons in history of all kinds,
art and entrepreneurship and politics and whatever, who
end up really changing things.
And so just to see that up close and to examine it
with actual quotes-- he has this quote.
When he was, like, seven or something--
this is from the Ashlee Vance book
where he says something like he would go to a girl
during recess who would say, I'm scared of the dark.
And he'd say, I used to be scared of the dark,
and then I realized that dark is just
the absence of photons in the visible light wavelengths,
and 500 to 700 nanometers.
[LAUGHTER]
And so when we see that, we hear that, we say, oh, look.
You know, like, of course, he's being a little weird,
but he's of course being rational.
And the cute kid is scared of the dark.
We all know the dark isn't actually scary.
And good for Elon for, like, adorably
seeing it like an adult.
And yet he says a quote 30, 40 years later in some interviewer
that I watched on YouTube where he says, you know,
I don't know why people are so scared of starting a company.
Really, what's the worse that's going to happen?
You're not going to die.
You're not going to starve.
Like, what's the worst that's going to happen
if more people start a company?
And I'm thinking, that's the same quote.
That's the visible photon absence
of-- that is the same quote.
And the only difference is he's the only one being
the adult there, and we're all the little girl who's saying,
I'm scared of the dark.
And I had so many epiphanies like that,
looking at simple things about the way he
talks and things he does.
I say, that is the whole key right there.
That is the answer.
So that ended up being the fourth post
of the series, just about how he thinks,
which has totally changed the way I at least attempt
to grow in my thinking.
SPEAKER: One of the things that Elon
won't touch on publicly, and actually Google either,
is cryonics.
But you've recently written a post about it.
And in fact, you said, you've quit cryo-procrastinating,
and that you registered yourself, right?
TIM URBAN: Well, OK.
So what happened is--
[LAUGHTER]
No, I really-- so I made an appointment.
[LAUGHTER]
And I talked to Alcor, and I've talked to a life insurance guy.
And I have the plan worked out, and I
am going to be-- I will pledge to be signed up fully
in six months.
I'm good to die in six months.
[LAUGHTER]
But then what happened was I was close, and he was like, OK.
So here is like 17 attachments.
Just print those out and fill those out.
And you need, like, weird scans of other things.
And you need to just make sure you have this information,
then fill those out, things with the boxes.
And I just suddenly was like, yeah, OK.
I'll do that in the fall.
So I am cryo-procrastinating now.
But the real daunting thing is like, I don't even
know how to begin.
Do I have to call?
How do I trust this company?
That work, I've done already.
So that's why I have faith that I will do it,
because I've done all of the really icky things.
And I just need to finish the deal there
with a pretty cheap monthly premium life insurance policy,
and I'm like, good.
Covered.
Like, everyone should do that if living a long time sounds fun.
Not that it'll definitely happen,
but it definitely will not happen if you don't do it.
[LAUGHTER]
SPEAKER: In the post, you talk about the difference
between being dead and mostly dead.
Could you talk a little bit about why
that matters for cryonics?
TIM URBAN: Yeah.
So dead is not nearly as easily defined a word
as we all think it is.
50 years ago, someone collapses on the street.
Their heart stops beating.
They're not breathing.
They're dead.
They're declared dead, and that's the end of them.
Today if that happens, they're rushed to the hospital.
We have resuscitators of all different kinds.
And we can usually often get them going again,
and then figure out what was wrong.
And very often, those people live another bunch of decades.
So they weren't dead.
They were unable to be saved with technology 50 years ago.
So again, the analogy applies today.
There's clinical death, which is when your heart stops beating
and you stop breathing.
Again, it's been a little bit since I wrote the post.
I think that's the exact definition.
And that's clinical death, meaning--
the difference between clinical death and legal death
is that clinical death, there usually
could be procedures that could try-- we know that you
are potentially saveable.
But if you have a do-not-resuscitate contract
that you've signed, you know, if they
know they don't have much time left,
they have a terminally ill thing and they're suffering,
and once that stops, that's kind of a way for the hospital
to legally say, let's let this go.
And the person would like to let it go.
That's clinical death.
Legal death happens once the heart has stopped
and breathing has stopped for, I think, five minutes.
Maybe five or six minutes.
I forget what the exact number is.
And that's when you are, no matter
what they-- at that point, no matter what they tried to do,
you can't salvage that, because you have now become brain dead.
And brain death is the definition of legal death.
So again, people consider-- today,
there's clinical death, which we can treat like death.
It's not assisted suicide.
We can treat death legally.
And then there's legal death when you're officially done.
There's nothing we can do.
Now what cryonicists say-- and these people are--
I was super suspicious going into this.
Are these, like, Scientologist-type people?
Are these going to be people that are-- you know.
These are hardcore scientists.
These are completely, utterly rational, reasonable people
who don't attack the people who disagree.
They say, I understand why you think that, and here's
our thinking.
They're great.
The Alcor website FAQ is just such a smart place.
And what they say is, today, after five minutes,
you are unable to be saved in 2016.
But you very well might be able to be saved and restored,
and that illness you have, that even if you could be saved,
maybe you only have a few weeks anyway,
it's going to be suffering, well maybe that illness
also in a hospital in 2040, no problem.
We can fix that.
We can fix that, and we can also easily resuscitate you
and restore you.
Even if you're brain dead today, they
explain that brain death is not actually
that your brain is beyond repair.
It's that the state of your body is such
that when blood gets going again,
it will damage the cells in your brain.
So there's no way to bring you back
without then irreparably killing you.
Again, 2040, 2060.
Those hospitals, they might say, this is no problem for us.
We easily have technology to help this person.
So what cryonics wants to do, because they do consider
you still very much alive and just beyond hope today,
they want to put you on biological pause
by vitrifying you.
Not freezing you, because then the ice crystals
would destroy your cells.
Vitrifying, which is putting you in a glass-like state where
essentially your cells, the activity and the atoms
in your body have just slowed so much that they can't move.
But they put antifreeze solution, actually,
in your veins so that it will not be able to congeal into it
or to crystallize into ice.
So you end up vitrified in this biological pause.
And they're incredibly honest and fair about saying,
there's a good chance that the way we're doing this today
will have messed something up, and in the future,
even if they had the technology, they won't be able to save you.
Or that that technology will never happen,
or that you'll be there, and reanimating vitrified people
is not a top priority of theirs.
We don't know.
But they believe that it will be, because they say,
is it a priority to help someone who's in a coma get out of it?
Of course.
And not because the doctor cares about you or is a good person.
Because it's their job.
And they think that once people start being able to be revived,
a vitrified person is just as much a living
patient as anyone else.
So anyway, they say, this might not work.
But at least it gives a shot.
And it's putting a bet on the future technology.
And you know, if you look at the past
and how much we would have blown the people's minds in centuries
past had we brought them to today,
I don't want to bet against the future.
The future is going to be rad.
It's going to shock us.
So I'll take my chances.
Sure.
Like, here's my vitrified body.
See what you can do.
It's better than the alternative, which is really
shitty, the alternative.
[LAUGHTER]
SPEAKER: Many people in this room
are aware of the potential impact of superintelligence.
We talked about it.
In fact, many of us are on the bleeding edge
of its development.
What message would you pass along
to people who are developing artificial intelligence right
now?
TIM URBAN: Honestly, I want to be like,
oh, don't forget about safety.
But I think those people are aware of the safety problem
already.
It's not like they're not-- these
are really intelligent people, and I
think that they're aware of it.
And I think that they are trying to do it
in the best way possible.
I think they know that this is going to happen.
Someone's going to do it.
The human species is going to do this.
You can't stop the species as a whole from building technology
that it wants to build.
So I would just say, like, good luck.
Keep going.
[LAUGHTER]
Seriously, I think they're doing awesome stuff,
and I just hope it works out well.
And someone's going to do it.
And yeah.
SPEAKER: Thanks, Tim.
TIM URBAN: Yeah.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER: Now if you don't mind, we'd
like to move into questions from the audience.
TIM URBAN: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Who should we invite to speak next?
TIM URBAN: I mean, you're asking at a weird time,
because I'm working on a post that's
I'm about to do a big VR post, very much, like, in this world.
But at the moment, I'm working on a post that
is completely unrelated to technology,
and it has to do with, like, our culture
kind of censoring freedom of speech a little bit,
and me being scared as a blogger to write
about all kinds of important social issues
that I shouldn't be scared to write about.
And as, like, a liberal guy, I'm scared of the liberals here.
And so I would say someone like Sam Harris or, you know--
AUDIENCE: Who's also [INAUDIBLE] this topic.
TIM URBAN: Yeah.
Right.
And Sam Harris also is awesome when he talks
about AI or any of this stuff.
He's just one of these people that's
interested in interesting things.
But he's my intellectual hero.
He really is, like, just super logical and super brave.
SPEAKER: The question of from submitted.
Could you talk about learning new subject areas well enough
to write about them?
Are there signs you personally use
for gauging the soundness of your own understanding
of the new area?
What are they?
TIM URBAN: Yeah.
So I very much am clear about what
I am, which is not an expert.
I will never try to be an expert.
I'm not going to try to teach experts anything.
What I'm trying to do is the equivalent of enough
where I could sit down at, like, a table with friends
and just be like, OK.
Listen to this thing I've been reading about for 40 hours.
And by the time it's done, they're like, oh, OK.
I'm with you.
Like, I want to go from here to here.
If the expert's at the ceiling, I want to go from here to here,
and then get a lot of people that are curious like me here
up there with me.
And so for me, that is often simply
I'm reading smart people saying stuff,
and then I'm trying to-- and the thing that I'm
good at that sometimes they're not is taking what they're
saying, especially if they're in multiple views,
and building some kind of memorable framework
to put them all together in something
where someone can read that.
And it's one thing to read it and understand it then,
but maybe six months later, still kind of
have that in your head because the framework or the terms,
or something about the way it was articulated
helps you build that permanent framework in your head.
So that's my job.
And sometimes it's easier.
I found cryonics to be easier, because the cryonicists are all
saying the same thing.
And then there's a lot of people who don't understand it
who are not to be taken seriously.
Ironically, the cryogenecists who
are the ones who work with cold temperatures for things
like preserving organs and other things
like that, they hate cryonics.
It's like the nerd war of the cold.
It's like this odd situation.
But just again and again, I read quotes from them that
would say, oh-- it was just immediately say,
oh, you're being like a lying politician.
You're just slandering them.
So I would just rule them out as interesting intellectuals.
You know, and I would find-- I look for real dissent.
Because the thing I don't want to do is read a viewpoint,
and there's a big very valid dissent viewpoint,
and I miss it.
And then I present this very strongly.
If there is a valid dissent point,
I want to read both and then present both.
So for me, it's just making sure that I've
identified what the various relevant viewpoints are.
And then once I feel like I've read a bunch of all of them
and I'm not being propaganded by one of them,
then I'm ready to go.
I don't need to go much further than that.
AUDIENCE: So there are some concepts
that make it hard to think accurately.
Superstition, for example, makes it hard to do science right.
And I'm wondering, I was struck by how often
you use the word insane in talking about AI researchers.
I'm wondering if it's possible that there's some concept that
is contagious and sticky and pervasive in AI
thinking-- perhaps consciousness-- that makes
it very hard to think sanely.
And so when we ask AI researchers today,
it's like asking a medieval theologian about science.
TIM URBAN: Yeah.
I was having a discussion the other day about, what
are the things that are going to be really offensive in 50 years
that we're just going for it with now without realizing it?
One of the things someone mentioned
was, like, the word crazy and insane
might be, like, highly offensive in 50 years.
Anyway, just since I throw it out there, like,
20 times in this conversation, I'll mention that.
I think that to me, the thing that just strikes me
as, oh, there could be a total delusion here
or they could be a smarter future people or smarter
future something might look at us today
and say, oh, they were totally missing something critical.
I think that's what you're asking.
AUDIENCE: Something has to be disbelieved in, like miracles,
in order to think accurately about the way
the scientific world works.
TIM URBAN: It may have to do with consciousness.
It might have to do with-- there's
a big distinction-- again, I have trouble
with the concept of consciousness.
But a distinction between if we do believe in consciousness,
and then, if AI can become conscious-- if whatever
codes that in our brain isn't some magical thing,
it's just neurons firing in a certain pattern.
So if we can replicate that, we actually
might view it as not even necessarily bad
if it wins and, like, we end up out.
Because it's more important than we are in that case.
We're more important-- if someone
kills a dog, that's bad, but way less bad
than if they kill a human.
And because humans are smarter, they have a higher capacity
for suffering and for joy.
And so we consider ourselves more important.
[LAUGH]
He's looking at me like I'm crazy.
But if--
[LAUGHTER]
--if we get to a superintelligent AI that
is conscious, I think in the future
we could look at it as very myopic
that we thought that we were this critical piece
of the puzzle that we needed to last.
We may look and say, the thing that is much smarter now
is more important.
We were an important link in that chain.
Right now, it's very hard for anyone to think that.
We're such humans.
So that's one thing.
And then if it's not conscious, then it
becomes this really upsetting thing, that it's smarter
and then it got rid of us.
Because we were actually the highest real consciousness.
And the thing that's higher than us is now
just kind of a mindless thing, and that becomes a huge shame.
Still looking at me like I'm crazy.
But I would say that probably we're full of those things
because we're talking about a higher level of intelligence.
That's not something we even have the capacity
to understand.
SPEAKER: On your blog "Wait But Why," you've
written about a variety of high-impact, futurist subjects,
ranging from AGI to cryonics to the future of energy.
In the context of powerful emergent technology,
how do you think about the future of society?
What areas are you most optimistic
or pessimistic about?
TIM URBAN: We're always in the battle as a society,
just like each of us is in an internal battle of just-- we're
like a transitional species.
If you looked at really tribal, almost subhumans,
before we were fully humans, to wherever
we would be going if AI hadn't come here and disrupted
evolution, wherever we would end up
as a species of total prefrontal cortex,
rational decision maker, just total rational beings that
are very kind of-- that are just totally in charge
of their thoughts, and come from a total rational place,
we're in the middle.
We're battling with that new prefrontal cortex we've got,
and this new rational cognitive ability
we have that other animals don't have.
And then there's this complete animal
that it's stuck inside of.
And so society as a whole is somewhere
between humans as a tribal and warring and just
very small-minded animal species,
and a species of the future that has just
gotten way beyond that.
And so I think as technology emerges,
the thing is, you don't have to be fully rational as a species
to develop amazing, powerful technology.
And that's kind of the scary thing.
Like, I wish we could get there as a species
first before we started building a lot of these things.
It's dangerous for an animal species
to have that much power, because we
have very short-sighted, very weird, selfish motivations.
So I think that it is worrisome as we create more technology,
that the technology's still controlled by an animal
species.
But I would say a lot of it relates
to what I just mentioned.
I think that we need to continue to be a marketplace of ideas
as a society through all of this,
and resist the urge to get too much on a team
and really become hate-filled.
Which, again, my thinking these days
is that it's not just a thing of the right,
which a lot of leftists like to believe,
that it's really on both sides.
It's become highly tribal.
And I think that that makes it very hard
for us to move forward in a really productive way.
AUDIENCE: Earlier you made some brief allusions
to the emerging field of artificial morality.
Now some of the more recent findings
in the psychology of morality say
that the reason we can have such different morals today
than our ancestors did 2,000 years ago, despite having
essentially the same genes, is that our morals are
a function of primary wants and desires and the environments
in which we find ourselves.
If that turns out a good way to do it with AI as well,
what do you think, as opposed to companionship, ambition,
curiosity that drives humans, what should AI want?
TIM URBAN: It's interesting, our environment plus our nature
is what determines how our morality will shake out.
It's weird, because AI, again, it's
tempting in that question to anthropomorphize and think,
well, what would it want in its environment?
AUDIENCE: Oh, no.
What I'm talking about is, what should we program it to want?
TIM URBAN: Yeah.
Well, I think we would want to think-- it's like
the [INAUDIBLE] thing.
What would we want were we better?
And I think you have to get to philosophers about something
like this.
It goes beyond scientists and engineers in many ways
to try to figure out what we would want if we were better,
but even better to figure out-- to kind of let something
in more intelligent than us.
Figure out what we would want if we were better.
Because we're not better, so we don't want that.
[LAUGH]
And to continue to understand humans
better than humans understand humans,
and to understand what humans would
be like in a perfect utopia of plentiful resources
when everyone is acting totally rational.
What would we want then?
And basically, let it figure it out.
SPEAKER: Sometimes blog posts can only achieve so much.
Have you considered forming a group
or taking on a job that would have
more direct impact on ethical issues
like the development of superintelligent AI?
TIM URBAN: I've thought about different ways
to kind of scale "Wait But Why."
And the jury's still out for what I think
the best way to do that is.
Right now, I kind of think that I'd rather
write a post that inspires a bunch of 18-year-olds at MIT
who are smarter than I am to go into those things,
and then switch to a different post
that-- I think I can have actually a lot of impact
that way, by kind of inspiring or educating or getting excited
a bunch of people who are more capable of actually figuring
out these answers and putting their brain into it than I am.
So I think right now, that is the way that it's scalable,
is that it can scale by basically indirectly directing
more energy towards these things.
And I think I always fear that if I hired people and start
bringing in more of a team, I'll spend my time managing,
and we might lose a little bit of what right now is making
an impact on "Wait But Why."
So I'm still figuring it out, but I
hope to be able to scale this in certain ways
through the future.
Yeah.
SPEAKER: Tim, thanks so much.
It's been an absolute honor to be here with you today.
[APPLAUSE]