 All of this is governed by these mathematical rules which are very much like what you would experience if we were actually inside of a video game. First self-aware entities appeared, that's in a sense a universe waking up and becoming aware of itself, right, is actually an opportunity. If we can figure out what's going on with black holes and maybe even get some clues by looking at them, then that can actually maybe be the master key that can help us unlock some of the deepest mysteries of quantum gravity and get a unified theory of physics. A snap decision, you know, should we ask this person on a date or not, where it might come down to just whether one neuron fired or not in the beginning, triggering a whole cascade of events that could end up with you living in this city, you know, being married to this person with children or living somewhere completely different, doing something different. I'm quite optimistic that we can create a really inspiring future with technology, but that's going to require winning what I call the wisdom race, the race between the growing power of the technology, exponentially growing power of the technology, with the wisdom with which we manage this tech. But there's a catch here because technology is getting exponentially more and more powerful, right? And at some point it crosses the threshold of power where learning from mistakes actually goes from being a good strategy to being a really, really bad strategy. And I feel we've already crossed that threshold with nuclear weapons. And we've earned the verge of crossing the threshold with synthetic biology, which can be used fantastically to improve our health or to create engineered pandemics. And we're totally going to cross that threshold with artificial intelligence if we succeed in building artificial general intelligence that can outsmart us, you know, in all ways. It's not difficult at all to make the world much, much better. It's just that we have our monkey brains and most political leaders are very clueless about technology. And in short, of course, go into careers that machines suck at and are going to continue to be bad at for a long time. Boom. What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sackian. We are on site in Boston. We have the absolute pleasure to be sitting down with Swedish American cosmologist, physicist, professor at MIT, the author of our mathematical universe, Life 3.0, the founder of the Future of Life Institute, Dr. Max Tagmark. Hello. Pleasure. Thank you for coming on to our show. Such an honor to be talking to you. Pleasure is mine. Huge mentor to so many people that are trying to figure out where we're going in our future as an entire society and civilization. So super honored and really excited to talk to you about everything. Okay, there is quite a bit of content already on the Internet about a lot of the things that you talk about. You have, you know, your books on the Internet, your TED Talks are on the Internet, previously where you've talked about some of these higher level subjects. I want to really get into what we can say is not available on the Internet yet. And so let's see if we can start off by talking about the most kind of high level understanding of the mathematical universe because, and let's see if I can preface this by saying this, you've said that all of the mathematical constants and equations can fit on a t-shirt. And that speaks very highly of how we can potentially have a lens to see the world through, in a codified way, through math. And that could potentially be a way of even understanding how it can work computationally all the way from a cell or an atom all the way up to how a society works and how planets orbit, etc. So speak to us about this at a high level and tell us about it. So I think the single most striking thing I've learned so far in my career as a scientist is that the ultimate nature of reality, whatever it is, is just much weirder than we thought, much more different from what we thought it was than people in their wildest dreams would have imagined in the past. We used to think, well, there's this stuff, you know, it moves in certain ways and certain properties and like this is solid, this is a bit squishy, this is red, you know. And gradually, I think we've come to the conclusion that all of this is governed by these mathematical rules, which are very much like what you would experience if we were actually inside of a video game, you know, if you were Pac-Man or something and started to study your Pac-Man world, you would discover not only his stuff moving around, it had certain properties, but the things that you first thought had some sort of philosophical, physical nature are all behaving according to simple mathematical rules. You'd be basically rediscovering the source code that the programmer had put in there. And that first sounds kind of nutty when you say it. And in my mathematical universe, the book, I even go as far as saying our universe isn't just described by math, it is mathematical in the sense of being a mathematical structure, by which I mean that our universe doesn't just have some mathematical properties, it has only mathematical properties, much like a computer game. That sounds very nutty, so let's break it down a little bit. If you take an object, like this book for example, it seems like it has a lot of very non-mathematical properties, it's sort of bendable and has a paper smell and has different colors. Those don't seem like mathematical properties at all, right? My mom and many with her think of math basically as a sadistic form of torture that school teachers have invented to make us feel bad about ourselves or maybe as a bag of tricks for manipulating numbers, but like what properties of this book are numbers? Well, there's a three here, but that tells us nothing about the nature of reality, it's just that I decided to put it there, right? But if you look more closely, what you actually have here, seen through my physics eyes, is a big blob of electrons and quarks. And what properties does an electron have? Minus one, one half, one, and so on. Even though we physicists have given these properties nerdy names like the electric charge, the spin, and the lepton number, they're just numbers, right? The only difference between an electron and a quark, as far as we can tell, are what those corresponding numbers are. And in fact, all the particles that make just everything in the world here are described by just different sets of these numbers. In space itself, that all of this stuff is in, what properties does space have? Three is the property of space. That's the largest number of fingers I can hold that are all perpendicular to each other. Again, we came up with a nerdy name for this, the dimensionality of space, but it's a number. And Einstein discovered some more properties of space called curvature and topology, which are also things mathematicians study. And if ultimately everything in space, as well as space itself, has only mathematical properties, then it starts to sound a little bit less insane that actually we are just living in this gigantic mathematical object. Yes. And it's very interesting to break it down from the earth, 93 million miles from star, and it orbits in this ellipse 365.25 days per orbit. And then there's the breakdown of how a cell can be seen mathematically. There's a breakdown of how an atom and the electron and the proton can be seen mathematically, like you're just describing. So everything can be described then mathematically, potentially, and then it can get us to potentially the code of what is our universe. And then that can give us a huge jumpstart into a better understanding of how we are a video game character, potentially, and how we are playing and how we need to understand the code of where we live. Right. And I think a lot of people have a hard time letting go of this idea that mathematics is just ultimately describing some relationships between stuff that's fundamentally non-mathematical. If you're in a computer game, there is no actual stuff in Pac-Man, right? It's the entire nature of Pac-Woman or these little things you gobble up or the monsters or just relationships between abstract things that have no intrinsic properties at all. There's no actual stuff there. And in the same way, I think this is what we've learned about our physical world. It's the relationships that really, really matter between things in the world. And that's ultimately all there is. The entities themselves have no properties except the relationships that they have. That's not that different in some sense from our thoughts and the subjective experiences. They feel a little bit more ethereal than a book or an apple, but it's the relationship between the different pieces of information that give it the texture and subjective properties that we're so fond of. And the stimuli that comes in from the exterior and from throughout the entirety of our path of life from that point of time. There's no mind that's exactly yours, receiving the exact same stimuli. And also, if you think you ask yourself, why is it that the sound subjective feels very different from, say, the experience of the color red. It's not anything to do with the outside world. It's actually represented in the brain in very similar ways, electrical firings of neurons that you couldn't sort of tell the difference between them in the microscope. The reason one feels like a sound and one feels like a visual experience just has to do with its relation with other pieces of information when it's in your brain. And you can have all that experience even when you're not looking or hearing the world at all. When you're sleeping and dreaming, right, it still feels the same. So there is currently an amount of math constants equations that we have. And then interestingly enough, you taught me that there is potential for certain ones to drop off as we figure out the more proper ways to describe things. But then there's also undiscovered ones that we're figuring out to better understand the code of everything. Yeah. So it's important to be humble here, right? So we have made huge progress with science and with physics. There are still a lot of things we don't understand. We don't have that t-shirt yet with equations of everything. For example, we can make a t-shirt with Einstein's theory of gravity and you can make another which describes all big things really excellently. And you can make another t-shirt with equations of quantum mechanics which describe the subatomic world really great. But those two t-shirts don't get along. There is another t-shirt that nobody has figured out exactly what should be on it yet. Maybe it's string theory, maybe something else. So some humility is in order. But it's quite striking how much progress we've made, you know, 400 years ago. Yes. Like when Galileo famously said that our universe is a grand book written in the language of mathematics, almost the only thing you could do with math then was predict the physics of motion. If Galileo could predict that if you throw a hazelnut and a grape, they would both move in this shape called a parabola, y equals x squared, simple math shape, right? But Galileo would have no idea why the grape was green and the hazelnut was brown, why the grape was soft and the hazelnut was hard. Then Maxwell came with other equations for light and stuff that explained colors. And then we got quantum mechanics which explain why some things are hard and others are soft. And if you look now, we've actually gradually managed to describe almost, we've gone from describing almost nothing except motion with math to describing almost everything with math. What mainly remains are some issues about what's happening inside of black holes, what happened very, very long ago and around the time we were big bang, the ultimate future of our universe and most flagrantly what's actually happening in our heads. The science of intelligence has taken off quite a bit with AI but we certainly have a long way to go and the most spectacular failure I feel so far is our ability to just write down an actual scientific theory of consciousness of why is it that we have these subjective experiences of colors and sounds and so on rather than just feel like zombies, we go through the motions but it doesn't feel like anything to be us. Some people dismiss this as just silly pointless philosophy, I see it differently, I feel that we are just being lame and making excuses for not actually solving this science problem. I think both consciousness and intelligence are all about information processing and I don't think it matters ultimately whether the information is processed by carbon atoms inside of neurons, inside of brains or by silicon atoms in our technology but what I do think matters is that there is some kind of other equations which tell you which kinds of information processing are conscious and which aren't and we just haven't discovered them and we should. Yes, absolutely. So let's touch on this potential of code because I'm quite interested in your thoughts about this. There's big conversations happening about this role of a God or of what all that is is potentially and of a simulation, there's all of these types of conversations going on. What is kind of your perspective on what is a power that is greater than humans that transcends what we are that could potentially govern this existence of this mathematical universe? Are you talking about the extent to which maybe we are part of something grander than us or are you talking about kind of what makes our universe kick? Yes, well maybe a little bit of both. Our universe itself seems to be set up so that it can keep ticking along regardless of whether we are in it or not. I don't think the Andromeda galaxy would stop existing if all people disappeared. I don't think the Andromeda galaxy would stop rotating etc. So our universe is like a clockwork in that sense. We still have big questions about how it ultimately came into being and what's ultimately going to happen to it. But it does seem to obey these mechanical laws. To me though what's most exciting about our universe and also philosophically and emotionally and spiritually most empowering and interesting about it is that through us our universe has actually become aware of itself. For the first part of the 13.8 billion years since our big bang there was no one home. Our universe is doing all this cool stuff. Potentially no one home. Well in the earliest moments right after a big bang when it was just a plasma expanding plasma blob much hotter than the core of the sun. I'm pretty sure there was no consciousness in there. But life could be around as early as just a couple billion years ago. In other locations. Oh much earlier than that. Yes. It's quite possible. But very early on I think it's very likely that it was just very way too inhospitable for any kind of consciousness. And then gradually it went from being very simple and boring to being more and more complex and the first self-aware entities appeared. That's in a sense a universe waking up and becoming aware of itself. Right. We know what happened here on this planet. Maybe it's happened elsewhere. Maybe not yet. We can come back to that towards complexity. Yes. In any case I think that's the most important thing that's happened so far because if you look at all these laws of physics they don't say anything about beauty, meaning or purpose. Beauty, meaning and purpose are all things which can only exist when there is experience. Because those aren't in some sense experiences right. You can only have suffering or joy or pleasure which are experiences when there is experience right. So if we go extinct and all life somehow in our universe goes extinct gets destroyed by a deaf bubble or some dumb technological mishap we build. Our universe would go back to being meaningless. And before it woke up it was also meaningless in this sense. This is a very literal sense. There was no meaning because meaning is a kind of something you experience. So this is I think the most beautiful thing that's happened so far. This universe gradually got so complex that it woke up. And one of the most striking things I think we've learned through science is that not only has the universe woken up now but it has the potential to wake up much more than has yet. Yes. I was taking a little power nap before this interview and when I first woke up I just woke up like a little bit and then it became more and more conscious right. You went through this same procedure this morning. I feel our universe is like that too. Yes. We are having very interesting experiences with humans but it's clear our universe can wake up more. You look around on the telescope. Yes. And it's clear that the vast majority of space is not as alive as it could be. Some people who listen to this maybe think we live in a or convinced we live in a Star Trek kind of cosmos where there's all of those cool things going on all over the place and they're just hiding from us. There's not any really scientific evidence for it yet. You know maybe there is other life really really far away. The Zoo hypothesis is an interesting one. But I think it's much more likely that our universe has much more potential in the future and I think one of the most inspiring things for me personally to think about is you know what can I do to help our universe wake up more. Yes. Imagine if it turned out that you know we discovered that the only life on all of earth you know was on Rhode Island. There was nothing outside of Rhode Island. No plants, no animals, no nothing. We might even feel then that we have a moral responsibility to help life spread to the rest of the planet so it can wake up more so there could be more joy. More joy, yeah. Interesting. More experiences across all different styles of experience. Exactly. The opposite thing we could do is more ideas, more creativity. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. The opposite thing we could do is set off some gigantic hydrogen bomb explosions and kill all life on Rhode Island too. That would feel like a kind of bad idea. Which is a lot of what you do with existential risk mitigation. But if that's bad then clearly the opposite is a good thing to help life spread. Spread. Yes. And if you look out into the cosmos that's exactly what it is except much more extreme than going from Rhode Island to earth. Going from earth to help life spread throughout our Milky Way galaxy and to hundreds of billions of other galaxies. It's a good analogy. It would be dramatically more positive I think than just going from Rhode Island to earth. Yes. And I think most people lose sight of just how much opportunity there is for the future. Yes. Where politicians are just so focused on the next election cycle and people are worried about this and that, the thing that's going to happen next week. We forget to look up. The big history perspective, the collective civilizational perspective, how we got here, how grateful we are for getting here and where we're going in the next steps. It'll be exciting to have more scientists and engineers in Congress that will be a huge leap in bound for for society. Although it's going in the opposite direction you know there are less scientists in Congress now than they used to be. Well it's potential that the scientists and engineers want to do it on the entrepreneurial side of things. Make the impact as entrepreneurs which we've seen more and more entrepreneurs making more impact than government can. Which is very interesting to keep an eye on and to inspire young kids to pursue. Okay, I want to power around a couple physics things before we move on because otherwise we won't get the super intelligence. There's so much to cover in the super intelligence and AGI and geopolitics ethics around stuff like that. So quick power around stuff. What is going on on the other side of a black hole, another side of a singularity? It seems to be potential that it's the birth of another big bang? Sure answer, we don't know. We don't know, yes, yes. So black holes, what is a black hole? A black hole is just a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can come out of there, right? Not even light. The boundary of the black hole is called the event horizon and the history of black holes is a great study in humility because we've kept discovering over and over again that we were all wrong about them. First when Einstein wrote down his equations of gravity, this guy Carl Schwarzschild discovered the black hole solution and then for decades and decades people thought that actually the event horizon itself was some kind of singularity where something was really weird with space. Then it turned out that was just a math error people had made. There's nothing special that happens if you fall through the event horizon except that if you're keeping track you have a sinking feeling which if you're never coming back. It's like the event horizon of a black hole is like if you're swimming in the Niagara River upstream from the waterfall, there's one particular line through the river where the water accelerates to go faster than you can swim. You're not going to die there. You're just going to have that oh shit moment experience. And then people thought well you're going to only die when you come into the middle of a black hole where there is this thing called the singularity. Either a point or a ring depending on whether it's spinning. Then it turned out actually there is another thing called the inner horizon where you might actually die earlier by hitting things that come at you at the speed of light. And then very recently there's a firewall hypothesis saying actually maybe you do die after all at the event horizon. And the short answer as to what the truth is is we really don't know. We're studying and it's a key in understanding the theory of everything. Yeah because it turns out that they're really rigorously answering these questions. It's not enough to just work with Einstein's theory of gravity. You also have to throw in quantum mechanics into that. And those are the two theories we mentioned earlier. Don't get along so you don't notably know. So the way I see it is actually as an opportunity. If we can figure out what's going on with black holes and maybe even get some clues by looking at them, then that can actually maybe be the master key that can help us unlock some of the deepest mysteries of quantum gravity and get a unified theory of physics. Yes and that's again that's understanding the code. And this is a reoccurring theme. Okay another quick power round question. You've talked a lot about multiverses and I want to do just a specific understanding of the multiverse because there's enough conversations of you talking about them online. The multiple many worlds interpretation of the multiverse that there are multiple tons of different max tag marks just breaking out the different intersections of the things that you do in everyday life. Did you take the transit this way or that way? Did you write the book or not? Did you do the salad or burger etc. That the that the amount of doppelgangers of you happening. It's also kind of a very spiritual thing to to potentially tap into as well, which again, we don't there's many different ways to potentially do this through meditation or through psychedelics tons of different ways to explore this sort of understanding of the the multiverses poking and probing at this you have a you know you have a breakdown, which you know which will also link to so people can take a look at what several links in the bio for people to explore. Tell us about the the many worlds interpretation of the multiverses. Okay, before we talk about parallel universes, let's just talk a little bit about what we mean by our universe. Yes, I brought in here, just so we can orient ourselves. Yes. When we say our observable universe or just our universe for short, we don't mean all of space. We mean this, the region of space from which light has a time to reach us during the 13.8 billion light years, since our big bang, meaning there is plenty more outside of this that we have yet to have the light come to probably we haven't seen it yet. But every time we wait one more minute, light reaches us from another light minute away when more stuff comes into view, we've never suddenly had come into view a sign saying space ends here, you know, my observable universe is constantly opening up. Yeah, it is. It is. So what we need first of all is hefty dose of humility, because we humans have again and again made this mistake of thinking that everything we knew about was everything that existed, just to discover that that was just a small part of a much grander structure, right, a planet, a solar system, a galaxy, our universe that we were the center and then we weren't the center that we were just the star. We have a long track record of hubris hubris. So humility is all good. Yes. Now, how much is there actually? Well, pretty much all of my physics colleagues think that space is a lot bigger than than this. And again, every minute we wait, we see in fact more. The most popular theory we have what made our unit our space in the first place, since made it so big, called inflation actually predicts in the simplest versions of space goes on forever. Forever. And if that's true, then you can fit infinitely many other you universalized regions into this, where there will also then be galaxies. And ultimately, yeah, if you roll the dice, and things started randomly copies of us having all sorts of variants of this combination. This is what I call the level one multiverse. And if it sounds weird, it's only the simplest or levels. And I want to make sure this is explained. So Max is saying we are at the very center of this. Yeah, not because there's anything magical, but this edge is just that if you're walking in the fog and the visibility is 100 meters, you'll feel that you're in the center of your own little fog sphere. Yes. And that the extension of the universe goes in all the directions in infinite amount from here. And that the reason why there is this red ring around the center is because this is where are the disc of our galaxy. Yeah, this is just a photo of the edges of the part of the space that we can see taken with microwave cameras on on this NASA satellite W map, that's taking baby pictures of looking at the light that's been traveling for 13.8 billion years to us, seeing that when a universe was was 400,000 years old, and it only cost each 20 pens, as you said, to 40 cents per American to 40 cents per American to make these tremendous discoveries. So next time you think about the money that's being allocated towards science, give those big thumbs up to yeah, I've never met anyone who would forfeit one bite of a burger for these deep secrets about the cosmos. Now, we don't know for sure if space goes on forever. It might just be really, really big in which case there's a finite number of parallel universes. But inflation predicts typically that it goes on forever. The simplest space we all were taught in school in a Euclid space also goes on forever. It gets more even more interesting with this inflation theory, because it turns out it makes almost like a fractal space where where there are these boundaries where inflation never stops. And everything within an expanding boundary is is a level one multiverse. And then there are many of them in the level two multiverse. And this is such a violent process that the different parts of space that are made can actually if if physics, if space can be in many different states, kind of like water can be in different states, you know, ice, steam, liquid, you know, with different properties. If space can be like that too, which string theory suggests an inflation is going to make all these different kinds of space. That's the level two multiverse. So there might be some more far far away where people learn in school that actually the periodic table has only five kinds of atoms, or 180 kinds of atoms and so on. So here in our universe, the physics would be taught the same across the planets. But the history is taught differently of how the civilization evolved. But in an alternative part of a the next level of a of a different place in the multiverse that physics could in fact be different. Right. Because not not because physics is truly different. It still may be on rule by string theory. But a lot of things that we thought were fundamental weren't. It's like if you were a fish and you spent your whole life in the ocean, you might think it was a law of physics that water is always a liquid, just because you've never seen an iceberg. Yes. And you would learn that water has this this kind of viscosity, and this kind of sound speed, which is not true if if you're inside of an iceberg or extreme cloud. And then the third level, just that just adds more humility. We've discovered that basically, it's super hard to have any theory of physics that just makes the stuff that we can actually see and observe and nothing more. I gave you two examples. The quantum physics, the theory of the very small has that same property. We've discovered that when we look really closely at the electrons and these other elementary particles that make up us, they can be in multiple places at once. But we're made of them. So that means we should be able to be in many places at once. And this guy, you Everett, he worked that out in the 50s, and show that the quantum mechanics is just true with no ifs and buts, there's this one equation, the Schrodinger equation, and that's it. Then, as you were saying earlier, as if our life kind of forks out. There are many times when we make a decision, a snap decision, you know, should we ask this person on a date or not, where it might come down to whether one neuron fired or not in the beginning, triggering a whole cascade of events that could end up with you living in this city, you know, being married to this person with children or living somewhere completely different, doing something different. And now that neuron firing might in turn have been determined just by the position of one little atom in your brain. So if that atom was in two places at once, eventually you're living in two different cities. So this kind of branching and amplification of weirdness from the micro world, where a little atom is in two places at once, into the macro world is what leads to this, and so called many worlds interpretation of the level three multiverse. If that's actually the way things are, yeah, then every time you get a parking ticket, you can chill out and take solace in the fact that there was probably a parallel universe, you know, where you didn't kind of takes the pressure off a little. And it also at times feels as though the potentially the the Allens that could have went and traveled Europe or Asia for a little bit or the Allen that would have stayed in this town of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, instead of going to San Francisco, that I'm feeling all of those Allens at the same time, which is very strange. There's there's a lot to, there's a lot to talk, there's I want to make sure we actually get to when you're doing 3D Galaxy mapping as well, which is super exciting, you're working with all these different, diversely intelligent grad students. And that's been that's extremely fulfilling to see, and help mentor them and learn from them. And that's also really important work that that you're doing. I want to make sure we get to super intelligence. There's there's a lot to talk about regarding super intelligence. Okay, so somehow life evolved on earth, civilization managed to get the basic water, food, electricity, education, healthcare, shelter, to be able to birth now 7.7 billion of us that are alive now, and 100 billion lived and died before them to make this world. So now we are children when you were growing up didn't have the law of accelerating returns, so not so much. Me growing up had a little bit of accelerating returns. Now the kids born today have a lot of accelerating returns in terms of the exponential technologies associated with computing, of mapping the genomes, of mapping the brain, of understanding all of creating super intelligence. So we are kind of at an exponential importance right now. So it has been accelerating for a very long time, but the time scale on which things double, the technology doubles in power is actually shortening. So it's in some sense growing even a bit faster than exponentially in some areas. Yeah, if you think about how long did it take to just double world GDP, you know, from a thousand years ago, it took a long time or to double the world's population, now it takes much less time to double the population, or double the total economy or double the speed of computers. Computering, you have population. Okay, so this is actually really important. You've done a tremendous amount of work in this field, you're one of my mentors and so many others mentors in this field with Future of Life Institute. What happened at Asilomar two years ago, or with the 23 principles associated with artificial intelligence safety, security, figuring things out here. And we've had some of them on our show as well. And it's been super enlightening learning from what's being done there. Talk to us about, because your Future of Life Institute is taking this on, you know, there's a lot. There was, you know, autonomousweapons.org is very interesting where you're literally showcasing a really bad scenario that could potentially evolve if the geopolitics get out of hand and people want to hurt each other for power or greed or corruption. And we need to slow down and figure out the best way to move forward. Another way that you're doing this is through all the grants that you're that you're helping coordinate the brilliant people that are working in the field with people that want to fund those grants. So yeah, tell us about this, because this is something that is so pressing and beautiful that you're working on. So what kind of runs like a thread through our conversation so far and through my whole career is, as you know, I've always been obsessed with big questions and the bigger the questions, the more obsessed I've been with them, you know, what's going on with ultimate nature reality and so on. And the two biggest mysteries in science, the way I saw it when I lay on my hammock as a teenager between two apple trees was the mystery of our universe out there, which I spent the first 25 years of my career on. And then our universe in here, intelligence, consciousness, mind, which I've been working on in recent years at MIT. And in the very big picture, then what's happened is our universe has woken up, become aware of itself. And some of these self-aware parts of our universe, namely us, have become or have managed to figure out so much now about how it works through science. They were beginning to get better and better building technology to actually act back on our universe. Earth looks very different now, at least the Boston area does from a million years ago because of what we can do with our technology. We talked earlier about how we've even discovered now that we actually have the potential to do great things that help life spread through our universe, help our universe wake up much, much more. We also of course have the potential to do the opposite. We're on the cusp of technology that could just eliminate life completely and make our universe permanently go back to sleep. So in some sense I feel that after 13.8 billion years, our universe has reached this interesting fork in the road. We can take the life route or the death route and I think there's no more exciting question to work on to try to make sure we make the right choice in this fork. And the way I think about it is I'm quite optimistic that we can create a really inspiring future with technology but that's going to require winning what I call the wisdom race, the race between the growing power of the technology, exponentially growing power of the technology with the wisdom with which we manage this tech. Because some people these days I find take technology to be their new religion. They basically worship it and say technology is good and technology is morally good, the more technology we have the better automatically. But it's important to remember that technology is not actually morally good nor is it morally evil. Technology is just a tool, an amplifier of your power to do good or evil. And that means that the more powerful the tech becomes, the more important it is to think about how you steer it, what you do with it. Sometimes people ask me about powerful tech like AI and ask me if I are you for it or against it and I always ask them what about fire? Are you for fire or against fire? And that shows how ridiculous it is. Fire isn't evil or good but I'm all for using it to keep this house warm in the winter and I'm all against using it to burn down our neighbor's house. So how can we actually win this wisdom race then and make sure that we develop our wisdom for technology management fast enough that we do good things with our tech? The big thing we learn by looking at history is that we've always in the past always used this strategy of learning from mistakes. First we invented fire, screwed up a bunch of times. Then we invented the fire extinguisher. First we invented the car, screwed up a lot of times, a lot of people died. Then we invented the seat belt, the airbag, the traffic light and laws against driving too fast, laws against driving when you're drunk as a skunk and stuff like this. So the wisdom was always reactive. There's no room for reactive wisdom. Well, there was with fire and so on. Yes, there were a lot of tragedies but I think we more or less ended up in a situation today where fire is much more positive than negative in its impact except for climate change. But there's a catch here because technology is getting exponentially more and more powerful. And at some point it crosses the threshold of power where learning from mistakes actually goes from being a good strategy to being a really, really bad strategy. And I feel we've already crossed that threshold with nuclear weapons and we've earned the verge of crossing the threshold with synthetic biology, which can be used fantastically to improve our health or to create engineered pandemics. And we're totally going to cross that threshold with artificial intelligence if we succeed in building artificial general intelligence that can outsmart us in all ways. So which means that now is a time to shift mindsets in this wisdom race away from just saying we're going to keep learning from mistakes to instead being proactive and the things you're working go wrong to make sure we get it right. And this might sound kind of obvious to you since I see you're nodding. But it's funny because people sometimes tell me, shh, don't talk like that. That's Luddite scaremongering. It's foresight. It's having foresight and figuring out how to work together across the countries of the world and the scientists of the world, the ethicists of the world. This is extremely important. And nerdy MIT people like me, we call it safety engineering. Like when NASA was about to launch the Moon mission, the Apollo Moon missions, they systematically thought through everything that could go wrong when you put people on top of explosive fuel tanks and launch them into a place where no one could help them. Was that Luddite scaremongering? No, that was of course exactly the safety engineering that ensured the success of the mission. And this is exactly what we're trying to do with the future life institute also. Think through very carefully, in particular with nuclear weapons and AI, what could go wrong to make sure that it goes right. And we get that really awesome future. Some people say, well, let's just stop technology and think things over for a while. Even if you think that we're a good idea, it's obviously not going to happen. I'm a very pragmatic person. I'm interested in solutions that can actually work. If you want to win a race, there's two strategies. You can try to slow down the competition. In this case, technology, which is not feasible and I'm not convinced it's even desirable. Or you can try to run faster yourself. So we're doing the second strategy with the Future Life Institute, doing everything we can to accelerate the development and this wisdom and get one more people researching and thinking hard about how to develop this wisdom, this theory of technology in good ways. And now let's talk about the direction because this is so important. Okay, quick on the way to direction. I want to mention this because it's so super important what you've taught me. The future of life award happens yearly right now. And I'm very excited to see where this continues going. So you taught me in 2017 about Vasily Arkhipov and then you taught me in 2018 about Stanislav Petrov. And these two in 1962 and then 1983 prevented during the Cold War what could have cascaded into mutually assured destruction of civilization. And the fact that they helped prevent that from happening is the exact reason why they received the award. And the fact that civilization knows Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian but doesn't know these two humans is a major problem. They need to be in the history books. They need to be the ones that we amplify and put up on major pedestals for everyone to know that we are just such a soft, gentle species here on the planet that could go poof. Absolutely. The fact that more people have heard of Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber than Stanislav Petrov and Vasily Arkhipov is really very telling because you could argue that there is no human who's done a more positive contribution for humanity than Vasily Arkhipov. Name your favorite politician now or in the past or your favorite thinker. Yeah, it would maybe have been a bummer if they weren't there. But if Vasily Arkhipov hadn't said no that time when the submarine captain wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo at the American Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we would not be having this conversation. And none of those other people you thought about would be relevant at all, right? Same with Petrov's ability to see that the ICBMs, the mistake in the rating system and sensing quite possibly. So I think, if a civilization keeps being very sloppy for a long time, even though they realized that having a nuclear war would be a bad idea, it's because they're not aware of all these close calls, right? Sloppiness is due to ignorance and you're highlighting these close calls for more wisdom and awareness around. We learn more about the heroes during the American Revolutionary War in our school classes than about these guys. In fact, they're never mentioned Arkhipov or Petrov. In fact, my kids went through the entire Massachusetts public school system and never even heard about anything about nuclear weapons at all, period. Oh, what? They never got to it in history class or in science class. And I've been asking my Uber driver recently just for kicks is sort of unscientific poll. How many nuclear weapons they think that there are in the world? Yes. The first guy said three. The second guy said seven. The third one said six. The answer is 14,000. But you can't blame them. We don't teach this. This is an example of the kind of thing, one thing we try to do with the future life is to just educate people a bit better because most people, when they find out about this, think, oh my goodness, I don't want some doofuses being playing Russian roulette with our civilization like this. US and Russia have almost started a nuclear war against each other by accident so, so many times. And if we can't even, and yet now the US government has decided to spend over one trillion dollars, one million million dollars on getting rid of almost all our nuclear submarines and missiles and replacing them by new ones. So, you know, that's, there's got to be a big dose of a loss. That's more than three thousand dollars out of your pocket and out of everybody else's pocket. More than three thousand bucks per American on something which is just going to make us less safe. And I bet you could think of something you'd rather do with those three thousand bucks if you had a choice, right? Well, if we could get China, the Middle East, Russia, the US, Africa, Europe, everyone in South America to just dose up on the love towards each other, then we could prevent spending three thousand dollars on absolutely useless. Well, it's not, it's worse than useless. If we took this trillion dollars and just got a hundred dollar bills for it and then set it on fire and nice force like bonfire, that would be better. It would cause a little bit of global warming, but at least they wouldn't up the existential risk that we would have a nuclear war killing most people on earth. And spending it on this is actually a net negative, right? Yes. We could totally scale back to having just one thousand hydrogen bombs. If you make a list of the one thousand largest Russian cities and just threaten to take those out if they mess with us, that's plenty to turn enough. We don't need seven thousand. Same for the Russians. They also have seven thousand. I looked at a list of the US cities ranked by size. By the time you get down to the mid-900s, you get to Wuburn, Massachusetts, the next time over here. Most people watching this have never heard of Wuburn. Most people live in metropolises around the world now. The Russians don't have to threaten to nuke Wuburn for us to feel deterred, right? So we could have closer to just a couple dozen instead. Even if we went down from seven thousand to just five hundred, it would be much, much safer. Much less things that could go wrong, and we're not doing it. So this is why we have started giving these awards out, because we want to celebrate the positive stories that there are people that we should be so grateful for. And I think we should have a norm as society that whenever someone does something really selfless, it doesn't further their own career at all. Now none of those guys got promotions for this, right? And they should know that they will be appreciated by future generations. And if they're dead when it comes out, gets declassified, well then future generations will show their appreciations to their children, which is what we did in this case by giving them 50,000 bucks each, because Archipel's daughter, Yelena, is living in Moscow and very modest means. And same thing for Stanislav Petrov's kids. Yes. And this is a way to help the world understand better about what happened and who our heroes really should be. And I would like to just make you have a shout out. If anyone watching this, if you know of some other unsung hero that should be some, email that person to techmark.mit.edu. We'll investigate them a bit and maybe they can get 2019 Future Life Award. Exactly. So let's talk about the direction of what's going on. So you were working with so many different global leaders on the subject of figuring out where an artificial general intelligence, where the direction should go, and this has a lot to do with the geopolitics of these things, and also the programming of these things. There seems to be a, I want to talk about it from kind of a high level, like over the next couple of decades, if not a hundred or more years, that what seems to be the preferred scenario with an artificial general intelligence is a merge scenario, where we slowly over time become more digital and less biological over generations. And that tell us about this. So what's going to happen to the future of life? If we don't screw up and somehow wipe out by some doing something dumb, maybe with nuclear weapons, maybe with by building AI that gets out of control, what's in store for us? Well, ultimately, I don't think we should ask what will happen. We should ask what do we want to happen? Because we're the ones building this tech, right? And it's fascinating how different visions, different people have in terms of what they're most excited about. Some people want to basically keep things the way it is now, but just cure cancer, eliminate poverty, solve the climate challenges and basically today's earth world, but better. Others want to try something more radical, so upgrade our bodies a bit more with technology, maybe so we can live much longer, maybe even become a bit more like cyborgs, you know, Elon Musk is working on Neuralink with his team. There's a lot of things you can imagine trying to do. And then some want to go the ultimate jump. Starting with this assumption that intelligence and consciousness are all about information processing and ask how can you take this information processing and liberate it from our biological body into some other platform where it can essentially be immortal and make copies of itself. That's the idea of uploading. If you can do that, then even what it would feel like to be alive could ultimately be very different from how it feels to us because our minds are very, very shaped by the evolutionary past. That's why we are so into eating and drinking and not falling off cliffs and the kind of things which and dating the kind of, because ultimately our minds, our minds are sort of optimal, our brains, we only got our genes of all brains just to help make copies of them. That's why we have some of these alpha male characteristics which are getting our civilization into a lot of trouble. If you have a more artificial, if you go to artificial consciousness, the mind space of what's possible is much bigger. It doesn't have to be like that at all. It's not limited to the physical world. Yeah. And for example, we have a very strong fear of death because we know that if we die, all the information gets deleted in our brains. We can pass it down before we die. Yeah. So of course, you can write a book and share some information. You can often, we manage to get our children to learn and adopt some of our best values. And as a teacher, I find it very satisfying if I can also share some ideas. I'm excited with others so they can live on. But most of the information still gets deleted, which is kind of a bummer. Whereas if you're an upload and you're in a plane that's about to crash, instead of saying, oh, crud, I'm going to die, you'd be like, oh, what a bummer. I'm going to lose two hours of my life because I didn't back myself up since two hours ago. It's less of a big deal. And people can dig through that archive of your mind and learn from you. Yeah. And you could just restart from where you were two hours ago. And also in a new flesh vehicle or in a new robotic vehicle. Yeah. And the reason why we are so egoistic and sometimes unnecessarily competitive also has a lot to do with the fact that our information is stuck in our minds. If we could just freely copy information from our friends, right? If you go ahead and spend a lot of time and learn how to speak Japanese and I can just let me copy that Japanese module and I'll let you copy my Swedish module, you know. And we can share experiences and other insights and so on. Then even then our life starts to become more about experiences and the individuality starts to go away a little bit. We become almost like a hive mind in some sense. So it's fascinating to think about if we end up going that route what kinds of minds could actually exist and what kind of mind you would actually want to be in the future. Yes. That's right. And you're doing a lot of conversations with global leaders on this subject and it's very difficult to handle this geopolitically. There is a ton of variables that are going on. Well, I would be a bit more cynical and radical about this. It's not difficult at all to make the world much, much better. It's just that we have our monkey brains and most political leaders are very clueless about technology and are also really not thinking particularly big. They're just focused on playing some zero-sum game and winning the next election. I mean, it's not like we don't know how to eliminate hunger on earth, right? We've had the technology for that for a long, long time. Why are we not doing it? It's because of our monkey politics, basically. It's not like we don't know how to eliminate the threat of nuclear war. Of course, we know how to do it. And you could just get Putin and Trump get together over beer and they could make a deal and sort things out. The reasons these things aren't happening are not because the five-year-old couldn't figure out how to do it. It's because there are other forces that sort of don't want it to happen. Why is it that we don't eliminate hunger at the same deal? It's because there are other powerful forces that actually prefer the status quo. And would you say those powerful forces are? Well, we're a pretty greedy species. Everybody's looking out for their own little thing and often these motivations don't line up very well with what would be better for everyone. Even though, and this is the opportunity, it's not a zero-sum game we're playing, right? So there would be a way of just doing things, running things, doing things better on earth so that everybody gets better off. Yes. The rich get richer, the poor get richer, there's no more hunger, there's no nuclear war. Yes. But we're not doing that because, well, if I can get super nerdy, we're stuck in a really crappy Nash equilibrium. This economist, John Nash, there's a beautiful film called The Beautiful Mind about him, pointed out that if everybody's just following their own egoistic interest at any one time, you often end up in a situation where everybody's worse off. Whereas if they could find a way of collaborating with each other, they would all benefit. It's a balance between the self-interest and the collective interest. So what you want to do typically is set up a legal system or other mechanisms that make people collaborate more so that everybody gets better off. Better off, yeah. But the world is full of situations like the prisoner's dilemma or the tragedy of the commons where this just doesn't happen. And this is a very, very interesting thing to think about if you want to make society better. How can you enable this kind of, obviously neither the Americans nor the Russians want the nuclear war, for example. Not very nice for either one. A deep sense of compassion. I don't think one even needs the dissolution of the self. To have so much compassion. If you think about why don't we have, why don't people kill each other every time they have a quarrel about something? Well, because a lot of people did that during the Stone Age and then gradually the groups that managed to come up with a good set of norms where they really punished people who were too violent were able to succeed better as groups and outcompete the other groups that just kept killing each other. So now pretty much all countries on earth have laws. They lock people up when they're too uncollaborative and so on. It wasn't, it's not compassion necessarily. It's just collaboration. And it's not a zero sum game. If people collaborate, they can all get better off. The pie is going to keep, the baseline for everyone is raised up over time, compassionately and technologically and just a lesser self of selfishness and a more of a collective sense. Yeah, and I mean it's fine to be selfish. The market economy is powered very successfully by selfishness as long as you have rules that sort of align people's selfish self-interest with what's good for everyone. And the most technology, as you mentioned, is the key to all this because before there was much in the way of technology, life on earth was really just a zero sum game. The only way you can get more was taking from someone else. Sweden, where I was born in Denmark next door, we had all these stupid wars. Sometimes Sweden got a little bigger or sometimes Denmark got a little bigger, but nobody, on average, nobody really got any richer. Now the pie is growing. And now, we haven't had any wars with Denmark or anyone else for 200 years and both Denmark and Sweden are dramatically richer because technology has improved in both countries. And today, with AI in particular, we have the potential of making everybody, again, dramatically richer if we can control this technology to not destroy us. Chinese can get much richer, the Americans get much richer, everybody else can get much richer and healthier and wealthier and so on. We get the best for everyone around us. Yeah, if we can manage to collaborate and not just wipe out with this stuff. Yes, yes. Okay, Max, you have this really beautiful imagery. We'll have it right here, where you have the mountain tops and the shores. And the general idea is that the rising tide of artificial intelligence across different fields is rising up in the fields that we already see being automated, the less cashiers are already here. There's tons of these examples where these are the fields that are at the shoreline that are already being automated and they're creeping up. And then the mountain tops are much further away from automation. And so what would be the piece of advice that you could give parents and children to be robot proof, to be AI proof on the mountain tops for as long as possible? So, in short, of course, go into careers that machines suck at and are going to continue to be bad at for a long time. They tend to be careers which involve a lot of creativity, unpredictable elements you have to deal with. There are also a lot of jobs where the customer actually prefers paying a premium for it to be a human that delivers the service. Those are all good. In contrast, a career where you're driving being a vehicle, bad idea, a career where you spend most of your time just reading something off the computer and typing something back into the computer in a pretty structured way, not going to last long. I also think it's important though to remember it's not that there are some careers that are all good and some that are all bad. Almost whatever career you go into, there will be some aspects of it, which are going to get around the verge of automation. So, if you're excited about medicine, for example, then don't become the radiologist who spends all day long staring at MRI scans on the computer and types in a diagnosis and gets replaced by an AI in two years. Be the doctor that gets this AI diagnosis and discusses the treatment plan with the patient. If you're into law, don't be the paralegal who spends endless hours reading through massive troves of documents and gets replaced by an AI in one year. But be the lawyer who gets the AI analysis and argues the case in court. That way you're working with the AI rather than against it and whatever career you're in, even if it feels like it has very little to do with AI, you need to stay up to speed on how AI is impacting it so you can be the one who gets it to work for you and makes you more competitive rather than less. And then the other thing is you just have to let go of this idea that if you or your kids are going to educate themselves for many years and then have the same job for 40 years, those days are over and they're never coming back. So whatever career we're in, we're going to have to keep adapting. Stay up to speed about what's AI doing and then as we just talked about, see how can you use that to make yourself more productive rather than letting that just replace you. Last question, what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? Other than my wife, you mean? My wife, of course. But I think it in a more philosophical way. I think it's really beautiful to me this idea that through us our universe itself has become beautiful because as we discussed earlier, before there was any consciousness, our universe wasn't beautiful. It was like a play for empty benches, right? Nobody there to see it. And if we can get our act together, which is what I really hope and what I would love to work with many of you who are watching this to help ensure that the life keeps flourishing more and more as we go into the future, then our universe can wake up even more and they can be even more beauty seen by even more conscious beings and that would be beautiful. Such a good answer, Max. This has been such an honor. Let's get more people working together on Future of Life on so many of the complex issues that you're helping pioneer and so many others that you're working with. Join. We'll have all the links in the bio for you to do so and the directions. Max, thank you so much for joining us for coming on to the show. Thank you. It was a pleasure. I really appreciate you so much. And as Max says all the time, dream big. Dream big. Get to your moonshot goals. We always talk about this as well on the close. Thank you so much for watching. We greatly appreciate you. Give us your thoughts in the comments below. Execute your dreams into the world. Manifest your destiny, everyone. Much love and we will see you soon. That's it. Thank you. That was fun. Thank you. Thank you. That look. That look what Max was just like.