#541: Eric Schmidt — The Promises and Perils of AI, the Future of Warfare, Profound Revolutions on the Horizon, and Exploring the Meaning of Life

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Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. My guest today is Eric Schmidt. Eric Schmidt, that's S-C H M I D T on Twitter at Eric Schmidt, is a technologist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He joined Google in 2001, helping the company grow from a Silicon Valley startup to a global technology leader. He served as chief executive officer and chairman from two thousand one to two thousand eleven and as executive chairman and technical advisor thereafter. Under his leadership, Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a culture of innovation. In 2017, he co-founded Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative That bets early on exceptional people making the world better. He serves as chair of the Broad Institute and formerly served as chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. He is the host of Reimagine with Eric Schmidt, a podcast exploring how society can build a brighter future after the COVID nineteen pandemic. With co authors

Henry A. Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher. Eric has a new book out titled The Age of AI and Our Human Future. You can find him Again on Twitter at Eric Schmidt and at ericschmidt.com Eric, welcome back to the show. Thank you. I really look forward to this conversation. I have been looking forward to this.

And I want to confess first and foremost that I have tremendous Insecurity around my lack of clarity on AI. So I am uh really looking forward to digging into many facets. But before we get to that, I want to pick out Henry Kissinger How did you come to collaborate?

With Henry Kissinger. About twelve years ago I met him at a conference called Bilderberg. And My father worked for the Nix administration when I was very young.

And my father Had Henry as a hero. He said he was the most brilliant Hardest working. And he was enigmatic because he has both a

very favorable reputation. But also a very controversial reputation. So we chatted and he said. The only problem I have with Google Is I think that you're going to destroy the world.

And I thought, Well that's a challenge from Henry Kissinger. So we invited him to Google Where he gave a speech. And he confronted the employees directly on the manipulation that Google was doing in his view. Of the public discourse.

And his criticisms were so apt and the people enjoyed it so much that we struck up a friendship. And although we're politically very different, with very different backgrounds. I've come to learn that working with someone this brilliant At any age is phenomenal. But when your co author is ninety eight, it's a special treat.

I looked up the age, I'm glad you mentioned it, ninety eight. To what do you attribute him remaining cognitively sharp into his late nineties? Is that just good hardware out of the box? Is there more to it? He works harder. than a forty year old.

I can tell you that he gets up in the morning And he works all day, he has dinner with his wife and his family. And he works at night. And he keeps up that pace seven days a week.

At ninety eight. I am convinced that the secret to longevity is being a workaholic. Ha ha ha. And and the reason I say that is that Henry Kissinger

At the age of ninety. knew nothing about the digital world. Although we had a lot of opinions about it. But He has mastered the digital world and artificial intelligence.

With the alacrity and the speed of people Who are just getting into it now. That's unique to him. That's a gift. А нацвай гіналіз. of our world is so incredibly interesting to me.

All right, we're gonna spend a little more time on on Henry because I must Scratch this itch. So you are very good at systematizing thinking from first principles, whether it's systematizing Innovation or hiring, thinking of things at scale. There's a method. to not the madness, but the outcomes.

Was Henry's ability to learn so quickly based on some approach that he has to first principles or a w a framework of any type that you've seen exhibited in him. That he applies to new domains. There have been some studies about the age at which you are your most productive professionally. And as you know in math and science, brilliance tends to show up

young in their twenties, they tend to get early awards. Historians, however, seem to get better with age. Maybe it's the accumulation of perspective. And the accumulation of reasoning and the depth of wisdom. It is represented by increasing age. And so

Doctor Kissinger has both the benefit of being a brilliant historian and also having changy And lived in the moment. And today he spends a great deal of his time with people talking to him about current affairs. And judging them.

with his historical principles in mind. It is from that basis of insight That when he looked at AI. He said

This is a very much bigger thing. Than people think it is. And I said to him. Why? I honestly didn't know. And he said because

We're discussing artificial intelligence as though it's a technology. This is like the beginning of the Renaissance. And I said, Tell me about the Renaissance. What else do you say to a historian who's famous? And we started talking about the Renaissance, and he said that The Renaissance is really about the age of reason. It's about individuals being able to think through their systems.

It's about society allowing experts to criticize other people. For the Renass decision making was essentially hierarchical and from a king or a religious leader.

That change. Allowed us to develop intellectual thought. He is arguing. That we're entering a new epoch. Similar to the Renaissance, this age of artificial intelligence.

Because humanity has never had A competitive intelligence similar To itself, but not human. I'd love to hear you elaborate just a a bit and then we're going to dig into you. A whole slew of questions that I have in front of me.

How you thought about The Composition. of the co authors on this book and certainly would love to lear more about Daniel. I know a little bit about Daniel Huttenlocker, but I'd love to hear more. And we could start with Dr. Kissinger.

I realise calling him Henry is probably gonna give me bad karma. So I'll start with Dr. Kissinger. Is it his broad familiarity with history as well as his knowledge of geopolitic and statecraft. That you were

Hoping to augment everything else. In the book, maybe you could just speak to how you think about what each party brings to This project. In our collaboration, the book suggestion was actually from Dr. Kissinger, and what he basically said Is that

We have an opportunity. to architect The questions That need to get answered in the next ten, twenty, thirty years. I would parenthetically offer that

We didn't understand. When we invented social media fifteen years ago or so. The extraordinary and compound benefits and costs of social media to our Society in particular our political discourse.

So armed with that knowledge that the tech industry had invented a tool that outstripped the governance of it, at least initially, and maybe for a long time. Doctor Kissinger said This Is an opportunity to ask the right questions. We recruited

Dan Hutlocker, who is the dean of MIT computer science. Partly because he's a good friend. And partly because He's such a good scientist.

He will make sure that our claims are accurate. And Dan worked very hard. To get The path of AI correct.

Many of the books about artificial intelligence are speculative. But I'm not aware of any book. That has both the geopolitical, social, and historical context. But also has the technology correct. Just to look at the opposite of speculative.

From a first hand perspective, could you tell A story or two. about what you've seen or experienced firsthand. With AI. Well, you use AR today.

Whenever you use Google search, Google Ads, spelling correction, Google Translate. The story on AI That's not really well understood is that in the nineteen sixties and seventies when I started AI was going to happen within a decade.

And my friends who were AI obsessed got their PhDs in this area. And then everything stopped. It stopped working. And there was a period of about twenty years, which is known as the AI winter.

Where the systems didn't work. And then a series of mathematicians in the eighties and nineties invented what is today known as deep learning. I'll spare you the technical details. The important thing about this deep learning is it allows the manipulation of patterns at scale. That allowed these algorithms to work.

And the big breakthrough was in twenty eleven with a Process called ImageNet. Where there was a contest to see if computers could See better than humans. And today computers can see better than humans.

Their vision is literally better. And I didn't realize at the time how important site was for everything. Car. Should be driven by a computer.

The doctor should use an AI system to examine you and then give him or her Recommendations on your care. I'd much rather have the computer look at my skin rash or my retina in my eye.

Because we now know from many many tests. That humans make observational mistakes, even the best. But computers when properly trained don't. So it was from this insight. But you could do vision at scale.

That you began to be able to do prediction at scale. And All of a sudden now We're beginning to see systems that can predict the next thing. And computers have gotten very good at predicting what will happen next.

The most recent well there are sort of three events in the last three years that really Are the index points. The first is that and Doctor Kissinger wrote an article After AlphaGo.

Called the end of history, basically. And Inspired by the fact that Go, it was a game that humans had played for two thousand five hundred years. It was thought to be incomputable.

Not only did a computer solve the game, but it beat the top humans both in Korea and China, I know'cause I was physically there. computer against human. And it was great fun. Па і на просе. The computer invented some new moves and strategies that had not been known to humans for two thousand five hundred years.

Now that's a big deal. The next thing that happened. Was it at MIT? A set of synthetic biologists and computer scientists did a very complicated trick. Involving going through a hundred million different compounds.

And figuring out which compounds would create A reaction. For antibiotic use. And they came up with using this technique. A new drug that

could not be foreseen. It's called halison and it appears to be The next raw scale antibiotic. We haven't had one in roughly four years. The third thing that happened was that a group called OpenAI

Built what is are now called Universal models. Where they read everything they could find on the web. Into something called GPT three. This is called uh basically a transformer.

And these generative models can generate things. So all of a sudden You have a computer. Тек спік. What it knows.

And These models are interesting because you train them and you don't know what they know. And furthermore, they can't tell you. You have to ask them. So it's like a teenager. And many people think that these universal models

Are going to profoundly change our understanding of language and thought. Because they only get better with scale. So we've now got four or five companies, couple of big ones, couple of startups, that are building what are called trillion parameter models. These trillion parameter models cost a hundred million dollars or so to make. That's how exciting this new area is. So you've got

Strategy in the form of Go, you've got medicine and drug discovery, really scientific discovery in the form of Halison. And now you've got language models and learning models, and we believe collectively that in the next ten years. This is going to come together and transform everything. I'm just taking a breath. To let that settle in. Uh GPT three.

really got my attention in part, and I want you to disabuse me of any misunderstandings, but I saw interviews generated between people who are no longer living. So I saw Marcus Aurelius interviewing Mark Twain. Mark Twain inter interviewing Abraham Lincoln. And I thought to myself Once we have enough audio and video online, this will really simplify my guest recruitment for the podcast because I won't actually need to reach out to the living human. It'll be great. I won't have to keep banging on the door of Oprah or anyone else. I'll just be able to generate an interview. It'll save me recording time too. You say that in jest, but we're busy building that. Right. And so let me just be clear how the Tim Ferris show would work.

So you have an enormous amount of video and audio data. So there's enough to learn to build a Tim Ferris question and answering thing. Where

you would have not only your tone and your the fun that you represent But it would also represent the sum of your insight. So it would say I was speaking with so and so. And he or she said this, what do you think? Now in this particular scenario, this is long after your own passing

And all your guests passing too. There's every reason to think that will be able to mimic Your Intelligence

And charm and wit. And that of your family. Your parents, your grandparents, historical figures. That will be fun. The question is will it really change society?

Or how will it change society? I recall being in a small meeting. And the discussion centered on the legal cases that will be forthcoming related to a lot of this technology. And there was at the time something related to now I should be clear I'm I wanna take a back step in a minute and define artificial intelligence and what that is so that it doesn't get conflated with other things. But in terms of developing technology

Deep fakes. Copyright. Defamation. There's been a lot in the news, at least in the last few years, related to deep fakes of Taylor Swift and lawsuits. And

We are all going to have to contend with entirely new breeds of legal cases, I would imagine. So that's another uh facet of this that is going to be incredibly fascinating, terrifying, and complex possibly. I would love for you if you if you don't mind to just define for me, quite frankly, artificial intelligence because um as I'm sure you have seen and can imagine, there are a lot of terms that kinda get copy and pasted into startup decks whenever they're hot. That would be deep learning, machine learning, AI. What is

A I and what is it not? The simplest explanation for AI Is it's a system that gets better through learning. But it's busy learning something. And that's the

Probably the easiest and current definition of it. When I say AI to my non-technical friends, they typically think of a movie that they saw. And the movie always has a robot. And the robot goes awry.

And that robot is slain by a female scientist. Who triumphs. And I propose a variant of that movie where the computers all conspire against humans and start killing humans. The humans notice this, the computers run away from the humans.

And a female scientist figures out how to unplug the computers one by one by one. That's not what AI is. That's a movie fiction.

And it'll be a very long time. Hopefully never they will have to deal with that. What AI really is. is a system of knowledge That is implemented inside the cloud, so it's around you all the time.

And it's very good at looking at large data sets and predicting things. It's very good at looking and finding patterns that humans can't see. I mentioned earlier that that computers were very good at vision. That was the first breakthrough. But what they're now doing is looking for patterns of correlation.

That humans can't see. So let's imagine that on Tuesday you do something and on Friday someone else does something. And it turns out that you're magically linked in the universe such that Tuesday causes Friday. But it's not a pattern that's apparent. Computers can discover that pattern, that needle in a haystack particularly well.

Worate this stuff at scale. You end up with systems. That look human like. Because they can aggregate data and they can think what you think. They can generate. solution.

There's a technology called GANs, uh generative adversarial networks. Where the computer can generate candidates and another network says not good enough, not good enough, not good enough. Until they find it. Gans have been used, for example, to build pictures of actresses and actors that are fake.

But look so real, you're sure you know them. So one of the concerns, the one of the real concerns. About AI. is that it's gonna be very difficult to tell the difference between information and misinformation. And I'll give you an example. Let's assume that all of your readers

And listeners. Or obviously human. And that the standard rules of humans apply to all of us. There's something called anchoring bias, there's something called recency bias. You know, people aren't completely rational computers, nor should they. We don't want them to be. We love humans.

But let's imagine the computer s gets enough of such people and it figures out But if I say the following outrageous thing first. You'll always believe me. And the computer discovers this. And so all of a sudden Everything it does boom boom boom.

I thought a lot about the way politicians speak. If you watch carefully They take a set of phrases and they repeat them over and over again. They're simple phrases. That's anchoring. They're trying to get the audience, their voters. to start with this fact and then judge past it. Well computers will be incredibly good.

At Exploiting that. That means that the world our social world around us within the next decade. Will become impossibly confusing. Because there's so many actors that will want to misinform us.

Businesses, politicians Our opponents. For fun, God knows. We don't know how to manage that. When you mention things coming together

In some fashion in the next ten years. Could you speak to If and how generalized or general artificial intelligence fits into that? Because I know that's a big question for a lot of people, including those who don't really understand the technology. When

Generalized artificial intelligence. Will arrive, so to speak. I think it's important to establish some of these terms. AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence. And AGI refers to computers that are human like.

In their strategic And capability. Today's algorithms are extraordinarily good at generating content, misinformation. guidance, helping you with science, and so forth. But they're not self determinative.

They don't actually have the notion of who am I and what do I do next. If you ask GPT three. Who it is. GPT three will say I'm a computer. But it won't give you A filosofical basis

for its existence, its purpose, and how it's determining where it goes. That is the distinction between AI and AGI, in my view. Now within the community The AGI optimists.

think that within ten years we will have such computers. The pessimists think that it will be far longer if ever. So let's say fifteen years from now. It may be possible to have computers. They have a sense of self determination.

That they know roughly what they're trying to achieve. Against a broader objective. Many people think that this will become An enormous competition.

Between humans. Because remember that those computers will be faster learners than humans. They'll have access to more data than humans. Other people believe that they'll be fundamentally flawed. Because they won't have the nuance. They won't have the

background. They won't have the cultural background of the countries that we all grew up in and the cultures we grow in. We don't really know. My own view. Is that this will occur But that the amount of computation

required to do this will be so great. That there'll only be a few of them. And furthermore They'll become so important. That they'll be like nuclear weapons.

And let me tell you why. Let's imagine you have a truly evil person who encounters this AGI. What's the first question they'll ask them? Tell me how to kill a million people. Obviously a terrible thing to ask and answer.

And the AGI because it doesn't have morals. Could actually answer. He could actually say, Well, do this, this, this, and this. And furthermore, it could articulate something that's not generally known. Because it knows everything.

So I think a fair reading of these AGIs Is that In the most extreme form. They're gonna be so powerful. That they're going to have to be protected.

We don't want them broadly used. They're gonna have to be used in specialized scenarios. Now such an intelligence will be enormously valuable. For drug discovery, material science. Climate change. making the world more efficient.

Making people more educated. And imagine with an A G I you could say Tell me how to teach a million children English better. And he could figure that out.

In its own thinking. To the degree it's thinking. You could look at all the patterns, figure out how to do it. And it you could actually ask it to write the program.

The beginning of this is today there are companies that are offering tools which will help you write code. They don't know what code you're trying to write. But once you start It can fill in a bunch of it for you.

That's the beginning. Of this phenomenon. In the extreme case. There are scientists and basically. Science fiction around

The future that could use something called The singularity. Which is the point where The computer evolution is so much faster than humans. Now that's speculation. When you talk to people in my world

Most people think the singularity will occur. twenty years from whenever you ask them that question. So that would say twenty forty one. Where do you fall If I may ask your personal opinion.

Assuming, and this is a big assumption, that there are people on the techno optimist and pessimist side who are very technically sophisticated. What is your Current best guess or intuitive feel, however you want to answer it, on the arrival of something we would consider AGI. The top scientists, the greatest inventors in this area.

collectively believe that we need one or two more breakthroughs. To get to volition. to get to consciousness in the way that humans do it. When you wake up in the morning, you have so many choices of how to spend your time. How do you choose? How do you handle unplanned situations and all of that?

Most people believe that the computers that I'm talking about. Will become enormously valuable partners. my physicist friend, I said to him, What would you like the computer to do? And he says, It's really simple. There are so much physics being written about now that I don't have time to read it all.

And I want The physics assistant. To go and read everything. figure out what disagrees with each other. suggest things for me to think about.

While I'm sleeping. The biologists have similar questions. People who are philosophers want new insights, read everything, help me think through this. I believe that in the next decade that will be the primary achievement. In AI.

And that is extraordinary. Because it means, for example, that we can answer questions in physics, math, medicine, so forth. It'd been unanswerable. We've not been able to understand the behavior of subatomic particles.

We can do it now. Enormous breakthroughs. But that's not the same thing as real human intelligence. I think it's going to take another breakthrough or two. I know this is maybe trend to look into the crystal ball with too much intensity, but could you elaborate on

If those breakthroughs are known, what they are, what like what the problems are that need to be solved, are are they known problems? There are people who are working really hard on The question of goals. And The computer systems

Have knowledge that they cannot explain. Which we can think of as intuition. So the system gets trained and it knows things, but if you ask it why it knows it, it can't tell you. That's intuition.

So the question here is how much more computational power and scenario planning do you have to do to look at all the different choices that you have every day. There are people who believe that it's perhaps a hundred times more computing power. And

Computing power goes up. It doubles every two to three years right now. And so that gives you a sense that within fifteen years. It's possible to imagine that amount of computing power. Required to do this.

And the reason we use computing power is one, we don't have a better metric. But also because The computer doesn't think the way humans do. The computer looks at scenarios and eliminates it. It says, Well, what if this and what if this and what if this And

The computer itself is eliminating this choice, this choice, this choice, this choice And finally settles on a good choice. So many people believe that the compounding of knowledge We'll take what we say a couple of orders of more magnitude.

Which is why these computers are likely, at least initially, to be few extremely expensive. And very, very large. Does the fifteen year Hypothetical time horizon. factor in

And and this is me getting into very slippery territory since I'm non technical, but does that factor in the Potential applications of quantum computing. For at least twenty years people have been focusing on this notion of a different kind of computer called a quantum computer. And quantum computers are hard to explain, but basically Think of them as they do all the computations at the same time.

So instead of going ka chunk, ka chunk ka chunk, all the ka chunks go at the same time. And The term quantum supremacy means that Everything occurs at once. Rather than taking the computer time to go through each of the mathematical calculations.

The reason that this is of such great interest is that Она декор аспектісорі на компьютер еж. Is the difference between multiplication and division. And with quantum computers you could break all of the codes and all of the secrets and all of the keys and all of that that we all use every day. So a lot of people think that national security groups are busy working hard to do that.

The consensus in the industry is that we are eight to ten years away from that. And the way they get there is that The current quantum computers have an error rate. Because It's not perfect.

When they operate. They're essentially Mimicking a natural process. Digitally. And Google showed last year.

But they could do this on a computer that would have taken a million years, that took Roughly ten seconds. Because of it so we we know it's possible. The question now is how do you actually build a real one that's useful?

If you had a real one, you could instead of simulating a physical process that typical one is called annealing where two metals basically merge. And this is crucial for high strength steel and titanium and things like this. And is of great business interest.

But the same thing would apply to AI if it worked, because the algorithm, instead of looking at all these different scenarios, would examine them all at the same time, pick the best one. Technically the one with the lowest energy stay. The current quantum Learning is not proceeding very quickly.

It's a very hard problem. My assumption is that quantum learning will occur In our lifetimes. But not very soon. Thank you.

And uh for people listening who want to do a a real deep dive on quantum learning, quantum computing. I have a conversation with Steve Jurvison that goes very deeply into this subject matter and it really does start to be a mind bender. when you get into the details, it is quite something. I

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Make ship. Happen. Yeah. I want to ask you, you mentioned what the philosophers might ask for in terms of augmentation or help, you mentioned the biologists, the physicists, I am going to ask you, I'm just planting a seed, what

Eric Schmidt. Might. use AI technology for in the future. But before I get there, I want to just look at a snapshot of current day. What are Some of the coolest or most impressive things that you've seen AI.

figure out on its own. I mentioned this new drug. And The new drug

Will accelerate. Combination of the M R and A Achievements. Plus the ability now to essentially replace the way the drug lab works. My sort of stereotype is the chemist wakes up in the morning and says

Let's try the following seven compounds. They try the seven compounds. None of them work. And at five o'clock they go home. To have dinner and think.

Watch television the next morning they think of another seven. Well, the computer can do, as I mentioned, a hundred million In a day. That's a huge accelerant in what they're doing. I'm very interested.

in the development of humans. Together with AI systems. And the example I would offer is you have a two year old And the two year old gets a plush toy. It happens to have A I inside of it.

And by agreement. As this child ages every year, they get a better toy. And of course the toy gets smarter. We don't know at all. What happens when a child's best friend is not

A human. Or a dog. We don't know. What that does to the child's Bonding to other children.

To their parents. I mean you know frustrated parents and the kid is busy and they give them A computer And do whatever you want. But imagine if that computer is

Learning. Talking. Thinking. educating at the same time. It's a God sound, right?

But what is it teaching? What is it teaching? What are its norms? What are its values? Will such a child end up being very stulted with real humans and really com comfortable with digital? We honestly just don't know. We know that people get attached to it.

Inanimate objects. There are many religions where inanimate objects have What we would think of as a bit of a soul. We mentioned this in the book. But we don't know.

I'll give you another example with elderly. Uh a lot of studies indicate that the elderly are very lonely. And Imagine if their best friend is a digital friend.

What does that do? Does that Extend their lives? Does it make'em crankier? Does it make their loneliness more perverse? I don't think we know yet.

Yeah, or is that digital friend an emulation of a relative? That's right. So now we get our Grandmother as an example, we recreate Her husband. And what does it do when she can chat with her husband who's now passed away?

We honestly don't know. When I go through And I look at these technologies, there are really four qualities in AI that are different. The first is it's imprecise. It's imprecise in that it can't tell you exactly what it's doing and it makes mistakes.

Don't use it for life critical decisions. You want a human Who can make mistakes. consulting a computer, you don't want the computer flying the airplane. And maybe never, but certainly not for a long time.

It's dynamic. In the sense that it's changing. It can learn, it can assess the situation around it. And change its behavior. This is the AI now.

It has emergent behavior. Emergent means things that come out that we don't expect. Strange things. Now we've seen this a bit with social media. I don't think anyone expected the government interference in the elections in twenty sixteen. That was an emergent behavior. It was unexpected.

by humanity using these tools, and those were not AI power. The final point is it's capable of learning. So you've got a system using the child scenario. You've got a child a child that's got a teddy bear. That looks like a teddy bear. But it's imprecise, dynamic, emergent, and capable of learning.

What's the teddy bear learning? So the teddy bear's watching TV too. And the teddy bear says, Look, I think this show sucks. And the kid says, I agree with you.

Again, we don't understand the implication, especially on formative. Behaviors. There's a whole nother set of arguments about national security and how governments will work and how dominance games will play and who will be winners and losers from this technology that we don't really understand. And we talk about that. Well let's

Actually touch on that for a second and This is something on the minds of a lot of folks. Certainly I know a lot of investors who are trying to Understand A I in the capacity of acting as an investor. I'm not saying we go there, but

You have spoken to Congress about, say, China's announced ambitions with AI. Ten to fifteen years isn't that far away. It's really close and certain things move very slowly, certain facets of say government move quite slowly, regulation

What types of corners are most important? To look around and I'd love to hear you speak a little bit more about the geopolitical Components. I was fortunate to be the chairman of an AI commission for Congress. We just released our report, very proud of it.

And we studied a lot about where the world is in AI. Not so much on these AGI questions, but the the more tactical things that I've been discussing. We concluded that the United States is slightly ahead of China. In these areas that China has a national program to focus on this.

They're pouring literally billions and billions of dollar equivalents into this. They generate four times more engineers than we do just because of population size. And they're extremely focused. on dominance of AI by twenty thirty.

Which is Soon. In our report, we speak a great deal about what the government needs to do to help. It starts with more research. access to more data, making sure our values are represented so we don't end up with

systems that have prejudice and so forth and violate both our laws as well as our morals. We talk about partnerships and all of this kind of stuff. The reason this is so important. Is that pretty much every national security issue will be tainted or controlled by AI in the future.

If you look about cyber attacks The most obvious war scenario in the future. is the following. North Korea decides to attack the United States.

Yeah. begins its attack, China decides this is a bad idea. And blocks the attack. America's defenses are Awake alert.

America announces a counterattack which stops this. The entire war That I just described. Took about ten milliseconds.

Give you another example. In the military there's a presumption of human control which is very important. I was part of a team that wrote some of the AI ethics that are now used by the

US military. I obviously strongly support. And they say we want the principle of Human control, human authorization. So let me give you an example.

You're on a ship. And a new kind of missile, let's say a very fast hypersonic missile is coming in. Which people are developing. countries are. And it's coming in so fast that the ship can't see it, the humans can't see it.

But the AI has figured it out. So the AI says to the commander. In fifteen seconds. A missile is going to be showing up and it's going to destroy you and your entire crew. I recommend

That you press this button. To launch the counterattack. Fourteen, thirteen. Twelve. Ten.

What do I do? And at three seconds. That human's gonna press that button. So the compression of time The amount of data

And the potential for error. creates a whole set of problems around military doctrine. Now Everything that we Live in today.

Deterrence. all of the other things that we are all of us are familiar with. Great power competition. Are concepts that were invented over the last hundred years ago. And Doctor Kissinger actually invented much of the containment strategy in the fifties and sixties. Before he was in government.

as part of a team that sort of invented all this work. So I asked him, What does this look like now? How would you address this now? And his answer is Let's get an equivalent team of people and try to figure these things out.

Containment, for example, doesn't work. Containment is about keeping another country from getting something. Because these algorithms and this software is Pervasive. It leaks and it leaks through ideas and through discovery, not just from criminal leaking.

It's not like Los Alamos where you could keep a secret. So the way to maintain competitive dominance, that is national security is to invest in these areas both in terms of data and algorithms and to be excellent. But also to begin Some kind of dialogue.

About what the limitations of automatic war are. So another example. And I'll make one up now. So the scenario I described of the ten millisecond war. So let's say that

China in this case. Develops. An AGI ahead of everyone else. And this A Gi is thought to be so powerful. That it could defeat any

Of our defenses. then the loж on the American side would be to do a preemptive attack to prevent that possibility. And that's destabilizing of great power competition. So you want to avoid an arms race.

And an arms race in AI could look a lot like The arms race that we went through in the fifties and sixties. And people have forgotten how much of our military, industrial complex, how much money and so forth. was devoted to build more than thirty thousand nuclear weapons, all of which could destroy the world many, many times over.

Many, many rounds of negotiation got those numbers down to three thousand, four thousand such weapons, which are still plenty to destroy everything. It's an example of overreach. So I worry that because we don't have An agreement. On even what the rules are, what the landscape of limitations are.

We don't have diplomats who can have the conversations. And No single national security group, no single country is going to self limit. And say, Oh, we're not gonna do that. This is not Costa Rica, which doesn't have a military. So the natural

course of logic will be The development of these incredibly fast and potentially destabilizing weapons. For which we don't have a language. I think I'll just act as a stand in for listeners. That sounds very terrifying.

It does sound Not just terrifying, but challenging too. address and I I may come back to that. And questions of policy and geopolitics.

I wanna ask you the personal question that I alluded to earlier before I let that go, which is What could you achieve or what would you want to achieve or ask of AI? in the future that would allow you to do things you cannot do today. Almost every hard problem. In

Our society. is based on Either the computers can't figure it out, we don't have enough data. We honestly don't know how to solve it.

I'd like to get some breakthroughs. So I'd like for example To get better climate models. In my philanthropy, I funded a group at Caltech. Which figured out a way to predict climate better.

Using an AI system. It would model clouds. I didn't know this, but it turns out clouds are really complicated. And so they used an AI system to approximate how clouds would behave, which allowed them to solve the prediction problem.

called cleaner C L I M A. Over and over again. I would like the AI system to Educate me. And entertain me.

And keep be curious. About the dynamism of the world. Speaking personally. When I look at the newsfeeds. We're obsessed about politics and President Trump and so forth.

to the point where you get the impression that there's nothing else going on. But one of the great things about humanity and our world Is it's incredibly dynamic. We never hear what those people are doing. I'd like to see if we could figure out a way.

To advance against these really hard problems. Let's get some solutions around mental health. Let's get some solutions around drug abuse. Let's get some solutions around the rise of inequality. And let's have our computers help us with those solutions. I'd love to talk about it

This is something you know a lot more about than I do, but How programming maybe it will Or Incapable of addressing.

Morals and ethics. And I'll give an example, probably a bad example and not technically accurate, but it seems like we're already at a point with, say, the development of autonomous vehicles. Where questions that might have been presented in a

Freshman philosophy class. Like the trolley problem. actually need to be programmed on some level in the sense that cars need to make decisions if there is an accident they need to say Choose between going on the sidewalk.

At high speed and hitting Three Elderly or Swerving right and hitting one child. Let's just say. Not that we would ever want.

to be in that type of situation, but these things happen. How do you foresee computer scientists attempting to, if this is even going to be an objective, instill ethics and morals into AI. And does it just require a level of self awareness that perhaps we don't have? I'm curious how you might think about that.

There are many, many computer scientists working on this. Every major computer science program I'm aware of has a computer science and ethics research project. There are a lot of problems. One of the first problems is that computer science and AI. Are based on learning Data.

Literally learning. And therefore the information that they're learning has biases. So whatever prejudice and bias and religious problems that society has around it, the computer will absorb. So the research is how to identify those biases. Cause remember, in many cases, these systems cannot tell you what they know. And how to mediate them.

It's pretty clear to me. That there's going to end up being the system that knows everything. And then there's gonna be a supervisory system that limits it. So two different systems. One will be the knowledge system and another one which will keep it Within some guardrails.

So The question that was asked is not a permissible question. Don't send it to the system. And you're gonna have all sorts of problems. My favorite self driving car problem. Is Here in New York.

Eventually. All the cars are self driving. Because it's such a crowded grid and Traffic moves. Perfectly.

The engineers at Google and everywhere else have figured out exactly how to optimize. Under a set of assumptions, the aggregate and average delivery time of a human from place to place. It's a perfect computer science solution. So now we've got a woman who's going into labor. Who needs to get there faster.

Is there a button? In the car that says I'm pregnant. I'm about to give birth and I need to get there faster. Okay. So she presses the button and somehow it works.

How do we make sure that A gentleman who's lying cannot press the same button. In the trolley problem. All of these are of the form how do you choose one life or the o other

The correct answer is don't kill anything. And so we're gonna have to find ways to avoid being in the situation where you have to choose between three old people and one Children. And these are the great debates of philosophers and how do we value life and so forth. But I think we should start with the premise that the system should be designed

Such that it optimizes overall happiness and overall wealth. In the societal sense of wealth. As an example. We tolerate double parking. We tolerate

People speeding. We don't track every car and give them an automatic ticket every time they go above the thirty mile an hour speed limit by one mile. But technically that would be easy. If you want to eliminate the vast majority of crime

In our society. Put cameras. In every public space. With face recognition. It's by the way illegal to do so.

But if you really care about crime to the exclusion of personal freedom And the freedom of of not being surveilled. And we could do it. So the technology gives you these choices and those are not choices that computer scientists should make.

Those are choices for society. I use the surveillance cameras as an example to say that In Britain they're very widely accepted. When you're in Britain on a street, you're on camera. In the United States it's partial, sometimes you are, sometimes you're not.

But in Germany with a long History of the Stasi They are very violently opposed to such surveillance. These are three different democracies that have made the choices in different ways. So I don't think that computer scientists and the tech industry should make these decisions.

But I do think what we should tell people is Ar tools give you this range of choices. If you look at leadership in China, China is a couple generations ahead in surveillance. They can actually spot you in your gate now, the way you walk. Not just your face recognition.

This is not something we want to lead in. I'm just letting that. I'll sink in for a second. It's great. There's so much to chew on. And I'm gonna take a ninety degree turn.

Back to The physicist and the biologist. And others who will Be able to Consult AI.

Yeah. To help assimilate new information, new developments, get up to speed. They can't possibly Even with physical constraints. Keep up.

or digest the amount they would like to digest. Doctor Kissinger certainly over decades and Many, many others. Spend a lot of their time.

Ingesting information. And that could be in the form of reading, it could be in the form of conversations like this. I suppose there are two questions. One is How do you think?

thought workers or humans will spend their time once that ingestion is dramatically reduced or removed. And along with that If we get to the point where That is possible.

I mean there's a question of how it would be conveyed to the human How far are we from there simply being a direct brain computer interface where that information is somehow Seamlessly. integrated into our consciousness without being

Spoken or imparted to us. Externally. To answer the the last part first. We are In our industry, we're working on direct brain connections of one kind or another. They're all in startups.

They're all speculative at this point. They've shown some If you think about Two hundred years from now. To pick a random number.

It's probable that we'll know the complete details of the human brain, how it's wired, how it works. So if you think far enough in advance, well past our lifetimes, it's probable. that we'll know a great deal about how to manipulate the brain externally to the brain. We'll understand how it works. We'll understand the wiring. maybe there'll be some attachment and so forth.

Most people think that that will occur. No one has any idea when. When you go back to the the gains You want to get the basis of what the next twenty years look like. And I think it's fair to say

They were gonna be a wash. In information and misinformation. at a scale that is overwhelming and it's already overwhelming. So the most likely scenario is that each of us will have the equivalent of an AI communications assistant.

That will watch Like while you and I are speaking. My AI assistant is watching what's going on. And it knows my preferences, it knows what I care about, and it has a good sense of judgment. And when we're finished speaking, it'll say, By the way

Over here in Arkansas, the following thing happened. That you might want to check out. More importantly. This AI assistant. We'll battle with the misinformation assistance.

And it'll say, Prove to me that you're a human. Before I expose you to my human. And so you can imagine a scenario where the solution to the misinformation problem and the solution to this information space problem. Is that each of us has our own AI assistant.

that think of it as the equivalent of a phone, although in practice it's a supercomputer that's accessed through your phone or equivalent. That sort of keeps you sane. If you go back to my earlier comments about children. We have no idea what the rule should be for that assistant. So let me give you an example. We've learned, unfortunately, in the last few years.

That there are still. Horrific. Racial prejudice. horrifically Hateful people.

Well, they get an assistant too. Is their assistant going to Pattern their racism. Or their misogyny. Or there are violence against children, or all these sort of hateful behaviors,'cause these are part of humanity too.

Or will there be some regulation that says that your assistant has to be politically correct? It has to say Are you a he, a she, or you know, in other words How will society resolve that? And my prediction will be that each government

And each culture will adopt different rules about them. But they're not going to be unregulated. What we've learned, and I've learned really the hard way. Is that the technology that I helped work on and that is being invented now is no longer optional.

Fifteen years ago I used to give this speech saying Look. You hate the internet. Turn your phone off. Have dinner with your family.

Do whatever you're gonna do. But get off. And that's not a practical Answer today. The Internet is no longer

Optional. It's essential. partly because of the pandemic, but because of e commerce and business and knowledge and So forth. So it's going to get regulated, and the question is how and under what terms. I've I believe read you

Use the analogy of the telephone. Maybe I'm making that up, but in the sense that Just because there are bad actors who can use the telephone for wrongdoing for crime, et cetera. It doesn't mean we

eliminate the telephone, it means that we have means of regulation and enforcement. And so on. I guess the telephone by comparison seems to be such a Clean. Although increasingly maybe not discrete system.

Yeah. What are the most important things? Important next steps from your perspective with respect to Even thinking about regulation, the best questions to ask or just concrete. Steps.

I always like to use self driving cars'cause everyone can relate to this. So In California there's a concept called a rolling stop. Where you the California role, I guess. And when you come to the stop sign, you sort of forget to fulfill you roll through. So the policem comes over and says, You did the rolling stop. And I say to the policeman,

Sir, I did not. And then it said who did? And then the car says I did, sir. And the policeman says, Why? And the car says I don't know.

Very frustrating for the police officer. Yeah, so so who gets the ticket? So your choices are the human The car itself The manufacturer of the car

Or the data that the car was trained with. So that's the debate to have. Give you another example. I feel very strongly in favor of free speech for humans. But I don't feel very strongly for amplification by computers.

And so what we're seeing now is we're seeing humans who have Wacky false. conspiratorial ideas, what have you. Get picked up and amplified. In these systems.

That drives everyone crazy because we can't tell the difference between A genuine social movement and concern. versus A single crazy person who has an amplified idea It seems plausible, but is basically false. We have no way of falsifying such things.

That's something that's gotta get sorted out. We can't live in an information space. That is so full of misinformation and manipulation that we can't get through the day. When we go back in the book

To talk about the Renaissance. We say this is a new epoch. Because in addition to this misinformation that we've been speaking about We also have never had a situation In our human experience where there was An intelligence that was similar to ours, but not the same, that was non human.

And so imagine a situation where these intelligences exist. And they can be consultant. Well, who gets to consult them? What happens to their answers? So for example, if it's an oracle, do you have a rule that every answer from the oracle is published

To the world. Because it's presumably beneficial. But what if it's a private question or a secret? What if it's being used in national security? Again, these are questions that we have not resolved. So what we say is These are really hard questions.

What happens when The AI perceives aspects of reality that humans do not. But it sees a Connection. Yeah.

physicists who talk about new universes and new worlds. And you can imagine a situation where there's some thing that we as humans cannot conceive of Because of our limited intelligence.

But the computer detects it and then we say Oh my God. In math there's a Long story about An object that lives in a two dimensional world.

And the third dimension appears, but if you're in a two-dimensional world, you never see the third dimension. So you're always confused. So what if this AI can find a dimensionality of the world that we as humans, not a single one of us can Understand. And we're now confused. We don't know how to handle that.

What happens another example is Doctor Kissinger believes That I'll paraphrase. When something is not understandable by humans.

They will perceive it as an act of God. Or they will Resistant. And you can imagine a situation where you end up with nativists Who decide that this world that I'm describing is so impossibly unpleasant.

If they turn it all off. And they go to the equivalent of Uh the woods of Pennsylvania. And they say, Leave me alone. And you have other people who learn to drive it and manipulate it.

For good and evil. You'll have a choice. And then one final scenario to think about. Goes like this. Let's say you're older.

Kids are grown. And it's time for you to Take a break from the world. So you put on headphones. And VR glasses.

And in those V R glasses and headphones you have a life of you as a much younger person. A much more beautiful, handsome, wealthier stronger whatever. With the friends that you remember of the time recreated even though they may have passed away. That might be a more fun life for you every day.

Then the life that you have. In this scenario. What happens when we lose people? I call that crossing to the other side. When they wake up in the morning they just want to be over there. That will happen too.

It strikes me that Science fiction can be And it doesn't make it. future fiction. It just makes it current day fiction. But there's I don't want to say predictive power, but I think of Really good science fiction.

Snow Crash, the description of the metaverse, or you have some of William Gibson's work. I'm just curious, do you or have you read science fiction? Much yourself. Well, neuromancer is particularly good.

If you look at seven Eve's It's an extraordinary composition of of the importance of Humanity surviving the destruction of the earth. In in seven eaves toward the end.

in their science fiction they have Assistance. They have a funny name. That serve this function that I'm describing. So as usual, science fiction anticipates many of the things in technology.

But if you think about it. We Believe today from the reformation. That we have the soul power of understanding reality. But at some point

That's not going to be true. When that happens, what will our self conception? Look like. How will we conceive of our selves? How will we organize ourselves?

How will we value ourselves? Let me ask you Some follow up questions on this word reality and perception because it makes me think this conversation makes me think of and maybe getting the the full name wrong. So I'll I'll correct it in the show notes if I do, but I believe

His name is Donald Hoffman. Who is a cognitive scientist, also computer scientist at U C Irvine. And he has a book that's called the I believe The Case Against Reality and also a TED Talk. And the general exploration focuses on

How Easy it is to prove and demonstrate that we are Optimized for very few things. Right. And that what we perceive is not some

Objective reality. And that if you were a mantis shrimp, for instance, you would see things very differently. They have these incredible optic systems and so on and so forth. What does the word reality mean to you. And

How do you think personally that might change once we are deeper into the era of Well developed AI. Fifty years ago reality was television and normal life. Today reality is this online world.

that is constantly demanding attention. constantly full of stressors of one kind or another. constantly demanding your engagement because that's the way it's built. The engagement is around monetization, uh spreading information and misinformation and so forth. Everyone I know is being driven crazy by the explosion of that.

I think that in the next decade. The explosion will continue. And the solutions To be developed.

Because more and more the digital world becomes the real world. An example that I used, which is For example, you can see it in the movie Ready Player One. where people cross over and they spend most of their time in a virtual world. Is true for many, many teenagers.

And there's every reason to believe in the next ten or twenty years those worlds will become extraordinarily Sophisticated. So I'll give you a simple example. At Google

Because there was so much going on, we developed a pattern where people would be in meetings but they would also be doing their email at the same time. And we became very good at doing two things at once. And this was a cultural norm. But I had to put in a rule that when you had outsiders in the room you couldn't do this.

Because it was seen as so incredibly rude. Which it is. But it was a cultural norm. That we adopted and invented and worked well.

So You can see that the addiction cycle. And our world is largely now locked into addiction cycles, whether it's drug related Or whether it's technology related or it's attention related. I mean again, humans are like this. I am very, very concerned.

That we will lose perspective on what reality really is. Humans are not built. For the kind of stressors. that occur every day. We just aren't organized. We're organized around

The campfire and the lion and that sort of thing, which didn't occur at warp speed. And so I'm assuming that this Pressure on human development. Sort of craziness, this constant anxiety. Will lead to more neuroses, more paranoia.

Not less. And that People will then have to figure out a way Just in the same way that Parents are trying to keep their kids offline some of the time.

His kids are online. From the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep. Kids want them. Go play ball for an hour, I'm taking your phone away. We're gonna have to do the same thing for adults. What rules or

Constraints. Do you have for yourself around? social media or other types of Digital stimuli. One of my friends said that he stopped watching television.

Because he reads all his news online. And I thought okay, well that's a reasonable time trade off. Of course you're you're changing one stressor for another. But that says I only have time for one, I've chosen the online world. And so I think the first question is there's limited time. And then the second thing is you've got to have some rules. So for me

I'm online all the time, but I try to turn it off during dinner. I can usually get it. Done for about an hour. So the question is when you go without it for a while. Give another example. In twenty twelve.

A group of us went to North Korea. And we went from Beijing. And this was at a time it was legal. To do so as an American. And we left our phones in the Beijing airport in a trusted person.

And we sat in the lounge as the plane was about to take us to Pyongyang. without our phones, and it's the strangest feeling. And By the time we got there and got settled in the hotel, it's a group of maybe ten. We started talking to each other.

Which we would never have done. And within three days. We were best friends. The moment we got back to Beijing and got our phones, we were on them. We lost all context of what we were doing and we were back in the soup.

So There's going to be some in the same sense that people go to spa vacations. There's going to have to be some equivalent of a spa vacation from your devices. Yeah, I'm wondering what I'm gonna do. What type of agency

humans will be able to harness to position themselves competitively. In the world of AI. It brings up so many questions. I mean, such as the AI assistant. Will there be tiered assistance and will

the well off be able to afford better assistance. I mean certainly the better off have different types of access now that help them to separate signal from noise better than the majority. So that will probably continue to be the case. Do you think there and there's no right answer here, by the way. Do you think there is anything uniquely human that ultimately We will be able to

Find Value in. in a world of Of AGI, for instance. A lot of

People are speculating. That The eventual future І за мач рид. Where people are largely idle.

And that the units of production are so efficient, this is food production, buildings, and so forth, that everyone can live like a millionaire. Which means they don't have to work. And a lot of people would prefer not to work. many of the jobs they find not that interesting and they have hobbies that are more interesting to them and so forth. It's possible that will be true.

It's also possible that that world is dystopian. Because humans need meaning. So I think the answer to your question has a lot to do with whether the systems produce More meaning. For humans.

Or less meaning. If the computer replaces me That's less meaning. If the computer augments me It's more meaning.

This is true at every level of society. So there will be a small number of countries The US will be one, China will be another, there will be others. Which will be the leaders in these technologies. And because the way network platforms work

Those leaders will get far ahead of the other countries. So there is going to be a division between the AI enabled powerhouse countries. And the following countries who are using it. But not inventing it.

That divide will lead to enormous societal and economic changes. Which we don't fully understand. Put another way, if you don't have a leading university in your country Is doing this kind of stuff. You're gonna be left out.

Yeah, so At the human level Some people will be comfortable In this new And very, very

Curiosity driven, very interesting age. But an awful lot of people will feel displaced. Will they be less motivated or more motivated? Another example. We should be able

Using these tools. to build learning systems that teach in the most efficient way possible each and every person. We know people learn differently. But the old rear ends and seats thirty people in front of a chalkboard. is an outmoded concept.

So there'll be a completely different way for kids to learn and grow up. Which has got to be good. Because it'll maximize their potential. So you've got a person who's been maximized their potential. Will the economic system give them opportunity to be maximally potentialized? Give her another example.

I use science examples, but let's imagine that you really want to be A painter or a musician. Well, in the future you'll say to the A system, I'm imagining a song About a woman and a river boat in New Orleans, and it's a sad song, but it has willows in the background. Or something like that, and the computer will generate a song for you.

Which won't be as good as what you can do. But you'll listen to it and you'll say, Oh, that then stimulates your idea. So I want to invent a form of cubism that's different from Picasso. So the computer will then

go through a series of scenarios of Cubism that doesn't look like Picasso. And I'll say I can do better and then I'll be stimulated. So The people who can engage in that

I used musicians and Painters and scientists and thinkers and writers. are going to be the economic winners. But what about everyone else? Yeah.

It's a really great question. I also immediately start thinking It just shows you how boring I am, but about questions of copyright and intellectual property, you know, will you have some type of Blockchain identified. And verified assistance.

Who is kind of one to one correlated with your your identity and social security number, therefore you can copyright and own anything that AI helps you to generate or generates itself for that matter. It's gonna raise all sorts of questions. Yeah, I think we should build that company immediately, you and I, let's found it right now. The use of blockchain.

to do authentication is going to be central in this world. Because otherwise, where do you know the source? Who invented this? How did it actually happen? Yeah. Well we should talk about it. We're gonna need source authentication.

Very, very much in this. I was looking back at my notes from our last conversation. We covered a lot of ground. I recommend everyone also listen to the last conversation because we went so deeply into your your background, your history, the trajectory, different mentors. It was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. And we spoke a lot about Bill Joy, and When in the notes at least, if I'm

Remembering correctly, once he became a venture capitalist, he would read research papers, figure out who the best authors or participants were, and then call them and ask, What's the most interesting thing in your field? And I would love to hear Any examples of Startups. Bigger companies. Academics, particular teams at universities.

Any one or any groups that stand out to you as doing very, very interesting things. in the uh sphere of AI. There are two well known examples in AGI. One is called Deep Mind, which is in the UK. It's owned by Google. I've been heavily involved with them. And another one is OpenAI, which is the inventor of GPT three.

Uh which has a big partnership with Microsoft. Those two are probably the largest Focuses in these new areas. so called reinforcement learning, so called generative learning. And there are a couple of other labs. There's a series of university projects I've been funding

AI applied science. in the leading universities And The AI S goes something like this.

The physicists know how something works, but our computers can't. Calculate it. It's too complicated a calculation. But they can make an approximation. So often in S. A

AI system is used to approximate something. Good enough. So that we can understand how the system works. The most obvious area where this will play out will be in biology. Another friend of mine said that math

is to physics what AI will be to biology. You needed math to understand how physics worked. You'll need AI to understand how biology works'cause it's so incredibly complicated. We still don't understand how to model a cell. We still don't understand how the brain is organized.

There are so many basic things that you would think as humans we would want to know. That have not been calculable. For us. And that's where all the great discoveries will be. You know, I have to share something just because it's on This topic in a sense.

I have A Set of papers from The late Richard Feynman on which He drew the Kreb cycle.

And I just found that Crossover, so to speak. So fascinating. And we don't have to go deeply into Feynman, but certainly one of the people I've paid a lot of attention to. Biology is incredibly complex and I was thinking of the examples you've given and thinking of, say, protein folding or trying to identify receptors and the shapes of receptors or even structure the and modify the shapes of receptors. The process, as you've already said, is so incredibly labor intensive, and we've tried all sorts of things to try to pick up the Slack using idle computers in a distributed fashion. But

Once you have AI as a player on the field. I mean that could change things so fundamentally as you mentioned with that one example. I think Hallison was the example that you mentioned. It's a big, big deal. I wonder how AI may augment natural prospecting since nature oftentimes the molecules we identify in nature are just so beyond the wildest imaginations of anyone who would start from scratch. With

A say ground up synthetic approach. It raises so many interesting questions. It's worth Noting that there was a competition between two groups, one a group called Rosetta at the University of Washington. And another one in Deep Mind to develop

proteins, protein folding algorithms. And this year both have reported their results. in the open source and they've published how proteins the most common proteins that are part of biology fold. The reason this is important is the way that they full determines the way they interact with other cells.

And it is the basis again of drug discovery, medicine. how our bodies work, genetic expression, and so forth. These proteins are super important. These are the kinds of discoveries that If they were done by humans would

Merit Nobel Prizes. And this is happening right now. The way they do'em. is the same as I described, which is they generate Many, many different candidates.

And they evaluate them using AI and then they choose the one that has the best fit, most optimal. Outcome. And then they release it, and then that technology will be used for the next ones and so forth. What do you hope the impact of this book will be? It's so all encompassing in some respects.

This topic. What is the the hope with this book in terms of impact or what people will do or how they will change their Assumptions or beliefs. After being exposed to it.

Twenty years ago when we started the internet as you currently know it. uh the social media world, many of the other tools. No one debated what the impact on society would be. We were way busy.

building these systems to great success. without understanding the impact. Artificial intelligence is much more powerful. than any of the technologies up till now. Because as I mentioned

It's imprecise. It's emergent. It's learning. And insightful. We need to understand how we're going to deal with these things ahead of their development.

Over and over again, technologists build these technologies without understanding how they'll be used and misused. The goal of the book is to lay out the fundamental questions. Society has to decide around these emergent technologies. Which will happen.

And they will happen over the next five to ten years. If our book turns out to be the index case. Where After reading this book and after its publication

People say Holy Crap. I've got to get ahead of this. I've got to figure out a philosophy. Around this, I have to figure out a way where humans can coexist.

With these new systems. It doesn't drive humans crazy and makes the world better, not worse. That's a great outcome from our book. The age of AI And uh what a powerhouse of

The trio, the co authors involves it's tremendously important and I'm thrilled that we've had a chance to Deep dive into So many facets of this subject that has been of great interest to me, but has come along with great insecurity because I come at it from a lay perspective Before we go, I must ask, how has it been to start your own podcast? I enjoyed it. It turns out to be harder than I thought.

Because I actually had to prepare and I had to get context and so forth, but it has had an enough of an impact that I will continue. Reimagine with Eric Schmidt. You're an excellent conversationalist. I am continually impressed. I don't need to do much. That's the key to good interviewing is pick your subject. That's right. It's all about the subject, though. I think it's all about the the it's a dual dual process. But but I think it's worth it's worth thinking about In terms of what you and I do. You're a fan of Richard Feynman. When will there be a computer as smart as Richard Feynman? And the answer is a very long time from now.

And so we always like to focus on the lawyers who will lose their jobs and the politicians who will lose their jobs. But that's not how it actually works. What really happens is AI is going to be used to eliminate repetitive jobs Jobs which are boring and so forth. I mentioned vision.

Most of the military's activities are watching things. I'd much rather have the computer watching. And then when there's an exception, say, Hey, something happened and alert a human to take a look at it to better use of both the human and the computer. And so The good news is that what you do and what I do is not gonna be replaced by computers soon.

I'll take it. I will absolutely take it and I encourage people To Read this book. The age of AI. Pick it up.

You can find Eric on Twitter at Eric Schmidt and then certainly at Eric Schmidt.com. We'll link to everything, including the book and all resources, companies, technologies mentioned in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. Eric, thank you so much. This has been extremely, extremely enjoyable and educational for me. So I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you Tim. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny button of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

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