 I think a lot about how the human condition is changing and how technologies are enabling sort of what we're going to be. I think that the two big questions for humanity are what is the trajectory of intelligence incentives? In other words, what's the point? And also how do we get there without killing each other or just all dying violently? I think that there should be UN sustainable development goals for can humanity get on the same page about what's after people and can we figure out a way to have a non-arms race global dynamic to get there. Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sokian. We are onsite at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are now going to be talking about programmatically generated everything. We have Daniel Fajella joining us on the show. Hello. Alan, very serious. Yeah. Dan's awesome. We had him on already on the show. You can check out the link in the bio to our first episode together. And now we're going to be unpacking so much more about what we missed in that first episode. That was super short, only less than 30 minutes. But now we're going to jump into it deeper. For those that don't know, Dan's background. He's the founder and CEO of Emerge, the only market research and company discovery platform focused exclusively on artificial intelligence and machine learning. He regularly speaks for audiences of business and government leaders with a focus on the critical near term implications of artificial intelligence across major sectors, including presentations for the World Bank, the UN, Interpol, and global pharmaceutical and banking companies. And you can check out the links below to Emerge, Dan Fajella's website, as well as Twitter and LinkedIn. All right, let's start things off with one of our favorite questions. We find ourselves as stewards of Earth. What is your current take on the state of our world? Bias takes from everybody, I guess, right, given what their focus and their background is. Yeah, right now my take on the state of the world is an increasingly enfeebled and infighting West vying for some semblance of technological relevance in the next 20 years. That's maybe like a quick synopsis. And due to Asia? Yeah, China. China super particularly and for good reason. And sort of what that looks like in terms of collaboration and clash and whatever else in the years ahead. So technological dominance of the technologies that are going to absolutely transform the human experience, I think that kind of control there is going to be a big deal and I think that that's what the next 20, 30 years are going to be. So that's my hot take. And this is how we ended up intro-ing that episode with Dan. There was such a profound clip where he talked about the AI substrate monopoly and I had to put that at the front of the video to reel people in because it was such a solid way of phrasing and we're going to end up talking about that as we go in. I totally agree there's something interesting going on with the geopolitical kind of collaboration slash competition between the United States and China. I hope we can just figure out how to spiritually enrich ourselves to that oneness. Yeah, dude, 100%. I mean, who knows how it'll rattle out but I think that that is the grand cosmopolitan hope and I'm with you on that. Yes, all right. So let's talk about, you know, you write so much and in your writings you're doing a lot of, you know, you do a lot of short-term implications with the merge and this is the three sectors, pharmaceutical, banking and... Defense. And defense. And in the long-term you do a lot of writing, you do a lot of extrapolating of current trends in terms of especially, yes, virtual realities, artificial general intelligences, substrate monopolies, et cetera and human behavior and psychology. So give us a, you know, give us a synopsis on your long-term understanding of kind of where things are headed. I mean, lots to potentially unpack I suppose. I'm only one person. I guess the best that I could hope to sort of like maybe prize some potentialities in like one specific area but I think a lot about how the human condition is changing and how technologies are enabling sort of what we're going to be. I think that the two big questions for humanity are what is the trajectory of intelligence and sentience? In other words, like what's the point? And also like how do we get there without killing each other or just all dying violently? I think that there should be UN sustainable development goals for can humanity get on the same page about what's after people and can we figure out a way to have a non-arms race global dynamic to get there. So these are things I care the most about. I think that a big part of that shift is AI enabling economic prominence and military sway and power and influence in a great many ways. And I think China has some tremendous advantages in terms of how they can wield that compared to the United States. Just their culture and a whole bunch of other factors. And that essentially ownership of these virtual worlds that we're going to be creating, these sort of digital environments that we're entering is going to be kind of the other big aspects. So it's going to be the economic military prominence which I think is going to be swelled by tech. And then I think there's going to be what happens to people. And I think we go in, I think is the answer, you know, slowly initially, but we go in. We can go wherever you want to go from there, but this is kind of big stuff. Yes, that's beautiful. Now on the thing that you said there that really catches and I hope it sticks with a lot of people is that we desperately need to be on the same page globally about what happens. A human narrative. A human narrative around what's it for so that we can be happy, so that we can be prosperous. Like super good goals. Like prosperity and peace are freaking awesome goals. But ultimately though. But ultimately though. But for real though. Like what do you do from there? You know, that's a real question. And it's not obvious what the answer is. I have seen more efforts at potentially positive like utopic brainstorming and fiction as opposed to dystopic, which I commend as an exercise. I think it's very challenging, but I commend it. But yeah, I really hope we can get on the same page because what are we going to think that evolution cuts off from here forever? Like why surely the hominids are the end of all things? Well, not surely. Yeah, to actually get this to stick and to get it to become a United Nations discourse point of post-human. Yeah. That's what I'm working towards, man. I love that one. That one's critical and it seems like it is should be on the sustainable development goals. I'm literally, I am like the hustle is to get there, right? Yeah. Through whatever means. The UN is one of many mediums. Yeah. I think they're a good one though. I have a lot of respect for the UN. Davos is another one. Yeah, World Economic Forum for sure. You know, I mean, the World Bank could potentially be a conduit. I mean, there's a bunch. But yeah, to have some global discourse around like, but really people, what are we going to do really though? We already see it happening in every single aspect of wealth being concentrated and artificial intelligence working on behalf of certain people. Yeah, that discourse is massively farther along than it was 18 months ago, which is awesome. Which is awesome. Yeah, because then we're actually solving the problem. Yeah, we're trying to get to the near term stuff, right? And that's where we pay our bills is, you know, a bank will want to do AI with stuff or the World Bank will be interested in the economic implications of something. But yeah, it'd be cool to get it a little farther. Yes. So now, as we talk about, this is a hard thing sometimes for people to wrap their minds around. For those that have already seen what has happened with the last around 40 years of going from Pong to the photo-video-realistic three-dimensional RPG games that we play, being able to strap yourself into those games is kind of what we're talking about with these virtually designed worlds. And then one's ability to not only play in Dan's designed world but also to create one's own world that has nothing to do with our universe, completely different laws. Bro, we could take this from so many angles. But there's a bunch here. I think that ultimately people don't want anything that people say they want. People want the fulfillment of their drives. Or the Aristotle, you know, all things are done for happiness analogy is relevant. But of course, happiness boils down to whatever fulfillment of whatever drives. So do we really want relationships? Do we really want sleep? Do we really want food? Or do we want perceived fulfillment will gain from certain kinds of experience? Really, we want varieties of experience that feel like achievement. We want varieties of experience that feel like joy. We want varieties of... We want changes in qualia and sense. And when that stuff is push button, when that stuff's on demand, there is no bigger market for anything outside of perception because that's the market for reality. Because that's reality. So the market for perception is the market. It's the ultimate market. And as we get into eventually Neurotech and BMI which I've been... That was my introduction into all of this AI world is through there. But even just VR and the future steps there, I mean that's, in my opinion, where we're headed. And I think that there's... Japan is kind of the canary in the coal mine of sort of what happens with the first world. You get rich, there's no meaning because there isn't. And then you get sad and you escape into virtual worlds. And I think that that's what the whole rich first world is going to do. You know, a lot of the males anyway. And ultimately that's a tension that we'll have to somehow resolve or maybe turn into something constructive. But yeah, lots to poke into there. Okay. Off of that, the qualia catalog. I love that point. That was so interesting. So our ability to just browse through whatever experience is push button. That's what people want. People don't want sleep. They don't want girlfriends. They don't want food. They don't want anything. When you can give them that thing, that's the end of it. We don't want physical bodies. We don't want to have to cut our nails. We don't want to have to like... I don't know. We don't want to have to have relationships to feel happy, right? We don't want to... Like maybe we do, right? Maybe we want relationships. We don't want to need them. We don't want to hurt if we don't have them in the same ways. We don't want any of the things we ostensibly want. We want variety and qualia. And any technologies that start to vehemently and robustly fulfill that pharmacologically, brain-machine interface, VR, that's the market. The market ends with that. And that is also the way that people will extend their abilities and power because that will be cognitive enhancements that will permit them to control more of these technologies. An unenhanced person maybe 30, 40 years from now will have essentially no chance of really running the show. But yet that's the deal. The qualia catalog. That's your term, not mine. So I'm not going to steal that one. No, this quote... Is that Andras? There's no... Someone else... Alex K. Chen was like, Alan said neural real estate. That's his term. And I'm just like, dude, none of these are anyone's. They're just coming through... Respectful position right now. We're just being... We're vehicles. We are vehicles for the ideas and for the selflessness and the projects to be channeled through into the 3D world. Very Amazonian of you. We taking that on in that sort of an essence, transcends our ego. It gets us way past any of the... I'm with you, man. We'll talk about that. Yeah, let's hang with that. I love it. Okay, so qualia catalog. It's the push button ability to be able to peruse any feelings and experiences that you want. And yeah, that does... Because then you can jump right to love. You can jump right to Machu Picchu. You can jump right to the bottom of the ocean. And that's how it starts, but it's not how it ends. So it starts with fulfillments that we think we want because we're idiots. Because we only know what monkeys know. We only have the range of qualia that monkeys have. And so if we imagine, let's say like crickets, like fulfilling qualia for crickets, like we'll just make the analogy real quick. Yes, Machu Picchu sex, I really want to like... I want to smack that through that glass roof real quick. Okay, but let's go down first too, just quickly down into what it's like to be an eagle. Right? So we have the qualia experience of flying through the sky or the big dolphins or whales, right? Or octopus. There's so many other animals or insects to explore. And then, yes, of course, the chatter through the roof into it. There's so many senses that we don't have that maybe other species do. You know, chemical senses of ants or what have you, or dolphins, echolocation, or scratching the surface with these ideas. But the dexterity and proprioception of lemurs, right? We can't do some of the stuff they can do. So this is a range and we have suppositions around which of these experience we want. So if we're to select in the catalog, I forget, was it Descartes? Was it Locke? Was it... Now I'm dropping it, but if you only know the concepts of gold and the concept of a duck, you can't imagine anything except for a golden duck or a golden duck. Like you can only combine the ideas you have. So our qualia catalog is only going to be of the things that we think we want. But ultimately, there's a slippery slope into other realms, other domains. So we'll want Machu Picchu, we'll want love, but if we're not hindered by our current hardware, there will be permutations of positive experience to which we are not now privy. Just like monkeys are not privy to enjoy, let's say, you know, reading Montaigne or reading Francis Bacon or something, like they just don't get comfortable with it or they can't watch like a good stand-up routine and like dig it or oil painting, for example. There are entire realms of those things to which we have zero access. And presuming we can start to creak out at the corners, I think that there will be people who spend most of their time, kind of physical body as husk, spend most of their time, even if they are working within human hardware, experiencing things through senses and through limbs and through like, permutations of light and whatnot humans would never experience in the world of atoms. Like it just turns into whatever milieu behooves your aims and for most people that's just the fulfillment of desires. So yeah, the market begins with selling people on jacuzzi's with Mariah Carey like 1998, you know what I mean? Like that's how you sell it. You sell it like that. But that's not where it ends. Yes, yes. Okay, so there's both the designing of what is in the QALIA library or catalog, so our ability to go and design it ourselves and then there's our ability to go and immerse into what other people are designing. I'm really curious as to how this would actually work getting us into these 3D bodies meat puppets into that QALIA cataloging ability. How do we get us into that? Yeah, it's phasic. Well, I suspect it'll be phasic, right? Like I'm speaking like I'm prognosticating and doing anything other than prognosticating. The meat puppet, I like the monkey suit. I use the monkey suit on the red. Yeah, just trap. The red suit, yeah. Just stuck in the monkey suit. Yeah, okay. So yeah, I think this will first get there through VR. Much more robust VR than we have now but I think that VR for gaming is a really limited use case. I think that when VR becomes normal is I have predicted and we'll see if this is the case. Could be horrendously wrong here that when VR becomes productive, in other words, when you essentially sort of have to use it to do certain kinds of jobs or you know, so I have like 3 monitors up at home when I can have like a screen here and I can have as many monitors as I want running as many programs as I want at whatever font size and whatever volume as I want in a much more, you know, with less plastic and glass being used and less energy being used in the future, right? That's very hard computationally to bring all of that into this small lens but eventually it won't be horribly challenging that once you kind of can't not use it just like cell phones. It's like it was sort of novel. The cool kids were texting but then it's like, well you need to get food, don't you? You know, you need to like check your email, don't you? You need to make that sales call, don't you? And then at some point everybody has to. When that social pressure from the pragmatic perspective comes into VR, I suspect that's when the going in will sort of begin. So that would be like a phase one of sorts. Yeah, so this is like phase two of going in from the cell phone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, maybe it is a phase two. Lord knows what phase it is. But I suspect that, yeah, we're on the, we're riding the toboggan here of going in. You also made it clear that it is that again it's that you become less productive if you choose to not use it. Yeah. And you get access to less experiences, less productivity. Yes, so you are societal, the cultural push is to use it. Yes, yes. You can't, you can't not. I mean, technology is a language, right? If you really want to like, you know, you can't not speak. Like how are you going to think? And so, you know, these will be, this is extended cognition, right? This is distributed cognition and this is kind of where these things in many respects are headed. I suspect that gaming will be a reasonably isolated use case and that when the pragmatic pull occurs and you kind of can't not, to leverage the double negative there, that that's sort of like the, when the toboggan ride starts really kind of heat up a little bit or really speed up. But that's just VR. That's just, you know, like eyeglasses type stuff. From there, VR will get to the point where VR is not analog, may or may not be the right term, but I'm going to use it. Analog meaning like you're receiving it and someone else is giving it. Like, okay, I have VR and I can see my screens or VR and I can like see a movie or I can browse through a book really fast, have all the good stuff kind of brought to me. Eventually, these VR environments will be designed to be who of our own aims. Whether our aims are, I'm anxious and I don't want to be anxious and you can enter some kind of a VR space, maybe have some kind of EEG of some sort and go through whatever experience you require in order to kind of calm down or maybe get excited or whatever the case may be or maybe learn something. In the future, I would hope that, I could say in VR, you know, just put it on and be like, I'd like to learn about the French Revolution through the perspective of St. Juiced in 45 minutes. And just have a programmatically generated biography of the man who by all accounts should have been more prominent than Bonaparte had he not, had his head cut off. Just get a take of the guy. It's so hard to cobble together all those perspectives, but they're all out there and a computer system could hypothetically put them together. There's been movies of the man and so we at least have some actors that could kind of play them out and so when we can call upon whatever we want to call upon, whether we ask that of our email, I'll like, oh well, for all the sales, you know, for all the accounts that haven't raised even 10 million yet, like we're gonna send some permutation of this but fill it out with whatever their last press release was and yada yada. When what we command and what we receive are both tailored and customized based on our own aims, that'll be sort of leaning into, you know, what I'm kind of calling a phase two. So this is the programmatically generated everything world, right? Where you can say, geez, it would be neat to, you know, be in a jacuzzi with Marat, you know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying? You're right on the, especially on the learning side of things too to be able to just call forth a five minute video lesson of some topic. 100%. Another one is just the, using the meat sticks on the devices. So vile. It's so petty. Bandwidth is just not there. Oh, the QWERTY keyboard is like the, it's like the chisel. It's like, it's just, it's just, it's like, it's like caveman noises. Yeah. It's fucking, it's offensive. But it's as good as we got. It compares to what this is possible when I think the message, get the message done. Just like that. Yeah. Okay. So that's phasing into the next. And then this is, this eventually I would suspect will lean towards advanced haptic experiences to go along with this kind of VR and AI. At some point, at some point, I suspect that between haptic stuff between VR, like AI enhanced VR, the programmatically generated everything idea, the deep fakes, but on steroids in an all directions. Again, like I said, with Robespierre, but with anything else. And then how, I think the glass is one or slash optics, right? There's so many ways to explore that one in the computational capacity also being able to be outsourced to the cloud. So that way it can remain, right? So there's that. Getting there. And then, but the one that I also want to hear your thoughts on to help people with the capacity to visualize it. How do we get into this full scale haptic suit that helps us with that? Yeah, Todd. Yeah. I think, I think that increasingly, again as work permits us to wear this, as we can garner some, maybe admittedly, in the beginning middling, but at some point, non-middling experience of relationships in this, like our ability to relate to connect, eventually there will be programmatically generated friends that are just better than your friends are. Right? I'm not even knocking my friends. I love my friends. That's like one of like the few, like the rare, like this monkey suit thing isn't like as horrible as like it normally is. But imagine if your friends were constantly in their like peak state of stimulating you. Yeah. Yeah. But like a bajillion folds. A bajillion folds. Like imagine if you could be like, oh, like I want someone with all the insights of fucking Pericles and Einstein and whatever and to have no, none of their own personal goals and only want to coach me on what this particular objective is, right? Give me a break. I mean, it's just really hard to compete with that. Now it's going to be hard to get there, but man, programmatically generated anything three years ago compared to now it's like insane. It's just insane progress. And now, whether we can do that with personalities, I think it's going to be a challenge, but I suspect that it can fulfill more and more things through those means. People are going to sort of be in, I predict eventually there will be some kind of reclined environments designed to go into this mode, right? We're not going to be sitting up in office chairs wearing these things. We're going to have somewhere where we can comfortably write our back isn't going to hurt and we can just be in the real world, which is the world of perception because it's the only real world. Bang, right there. Now at some point, haptics are going to fit into whatever that thing is. And we are potentially going to be laying flat so that we're comfortable, potentially even in some sort of like a float tank or a zero gravity chamber or something. I think at some point, I mean, it might be at the level where BMI starts to come in where we're not only laying back, but you've got the matrix plug action going on. It may be before or after that, but I predict many people live in a husk-like condition whereby even the excretion of waste will occur in this environment. And there will be some set up, there's a prediction, there will be some degree of a set up where we just don't want to leave and leave when we need to, that there will be some way that- It just, this is all pushing me towards thinking that we are already in that environment. Yeah, yeah. I mean- We're already in that exact thing that you're describing that when you when you say we're in the designed world leveling up, you know, we're building our experience points in our catalogue of qualia. That's- How is that not already what's happening right now? Nobody wants to go to the bathroom. Nobody wants to sleep. What do you want? You want the fulfillment of your drives, which is whatever qualia you want in front of you and that qualia may involve learning things, creating things, achieving things, or it just may involve bliss in all directions. Either way, it doesn't involve trimming your damn fingernails. It doesn't involve going to the bathroom. It doesn't involve I don't know, maybe it doesn't involve physical friends at some point. Like, I'm not an anti-human, anti-friend guy. That's not what I'm saying. Like, But a programmatically generated friend. At some point, like it is what it is, right? You're not bad for, you know, thinking language is useful or the wheel is useful or, you know, the typewriter was useful or whatever else. You're not bad to suspect that some of these things will be useful and fulfilling in their own way as well. People will get to pick exactly what they want to browse versus in the physical world you can't. And that's your whole atoms versus bits thing. Yeah, atoms are just so, so lame. And, I mean, like you can use them to build these other worlds, but like, wow, they're just, they're just so cold and uncaring and not that like bits are caring, but it's just, at least there's some, like we've done pretty well designing the world of atoms. We've done pretty well. You know, me and you, we've got running water whenever we want it. We've got these funky devices and whatnot. Like, really masterful use of atoms. But, but, bits will just permit so much more of what we want and potentially less of what we don't want. There's obviously new insidious forces that will enter the world of bits that aren't possible in the world of atoms. But, but I predict that the blossoming of the possible in the beneficial sense of, okay, so then with that phases, we're, we're thinking that the virtual worlds get extremely good and the computational capacity here, then the haptics come in. Then the state of the brain computer interfaces, a brain machine interfaces. So then we're, I want, I'm really interested to know how that technology is actually going to be able to to work exactly how do you take that what's happening up here to a computer and then be able to enhance it and then that kind of opens us up to all these other worlds and whatnot. Yeah. Well, do you want to go into sort of the, I think the end game of all that by the way is eventually like the body already is a husk and there's this someone, I forget what biography it was of Emerson but someone had described Emerson as that his body was only the office of his mind. In other words it was just like a physical space to house, and eventually that that would, should it be possible, lead to the upload scenario. How do you think we're going to, how do you think we're going to have an interface? How does the mind get interfaced with the computer? Do we have like a technical understanding of how that will work? I, I am far from the man for that job although I will say since 2013 when I first started interviewing the people at Brain Gates at Brown University who did the early work on controlling a robotic arm to grab food and eat it and what not for folks who are paraplegic and a lot of that work is fascinating the limitations are super evident, you know and the, the, the necessity to retrain these models to sort of understand the circuitry and the response of the brain to some kind of you know invasive substrate in the mind like the the synapses around it sort of not responding to kind of like rejigger things to some degree and seeing how kind of oblong and haphazard it is it's really clear that we have a ways to go I don't think any of this is maybe it you know a decade off I think we're going to be I think it will become more and more evident that we're going in and I think it will become more and more evident that whoever owns a substrate is the man in the colloquial sense of like the bad big guy Okay so we're going to let the creative powers of however the brain computer interfaces end up working it's going to it's likely we're moving that direction and it's just we're pretty certain this can happen and there's going to be some creative permutations of how it ends up successfully entering into the world but this is kind of the general hopefully 50 ish Yeah I would I would say you know I would say like if we don't have some semblance of potentially available BMI within 25 or 30 years I'll be somewhat surprised like consumer accessible maybe wealthy within within 25 or 30 I'll actually be surprised given the trajectory of things but yeah it'd be super cool to have folks from Neuralink and BrainGate and whatever else I mean just the fact that we have for years of interviewing these people everyone was focused exclusively on the ameliorative applications that is to say people with strokes people with Parkinson's et cetera right that's where all of the money was going but really though I mean what could this stuff do cold like that was not the focus overtly not the focus and now you have Kernel you have Neuralink and there will be others and I think you know if we keep kind of cracking away we'll get somewhere but yeah the exact how's on that I think are rightfully challenging and another one of the things is that it gives us control right we were talking about being able to browse through the catalog and find whatever experiences you want to be in full control so if you do want to clip nails go for it if you don't happy birthday buddy yeah good for you yeah and then the other the other one that I think you mentioned is really good is just that you do get this kind of like this one directional love from friends or family or and it's just much different than needing to give love in the other direction as well and the kind of the reciprocal altruism and not saying this is conjuring and saying it's fulfilling drives and I'm just saying that that's what people are doing is fulfilling drives that's been your phrase that you've been using over and over again so the quality of catalog is about me being able to fulfill whatever drive whenever I want yeah and I think the only chance that we would have at greater degrees of volition should we have any to start with would be extending sort of with the lizard brain at the bottom we want freedom in a more overt sense I'm not saying that's easy but I it's very clear to me that freedom or control within the limited hardware and software that we have is is kind of a kind of a paltry idea okay so then once we do get to this hopefully let's say commercialized state of being able to tap into the super super intelligence in let's say five fifty years something around so then that really gives us the ability to kind of like with a joystick and a program to just be able to think what we want to generate and then to be able to jump into those experiences and that's kind of where we're at with this programmatically generated everything and then it's sort of like who owns it okay so now here's the next question why don't you give us your thoughts on the who owns it yeah yeah so the um in the next for the remainder of this century the the grand conflicts be they between great powers right like Luxembourg and like a two hundred person company and like I don't know Taiwan or something like are out of this picture the great powers so in the commercial side it would be your Google's and your Baidu's and what not on the nation side it's pretty much just the US and China maybe at some point they'll fade off of keeping idiots but great power conflict militarily economically and technologically in the next for the remainder of the century is ultimately about controlling the substrate that houses the powerful AI and houses the majority of human experience because most of the first world is going to be in some permutation of this it might not look like that right maybe there still will be screens but the virtual things really happen it will be real it will be very very real it will be where the majority of important things happen business or otherwise so the controlling of the totality of human experience owning the virtual ecosystems that are programmatically creating you know what most of humanity is experiencing that is controlling reality like in the most direct sense controlling other people's perception is controlling reality so that the ultimate end game should you want the top of the dominance hierarchy on earth would be to control the substrate that houses all of that stuff and so if a company is going to aim to you know win that kind of grand sense then that's how you do it if a country would want to then that's how they would do it China is certainly farther along that road at least culturally than the United States is in terms of you know the ability to kind of put people into an ecosystem that's managed but yeah whoever loads you in and whoever kind of manages whatever is programmatically generating your experience is the deity okay and I want to continue going into substrate monopoly in a moment because at the same time there's this really important principle to layer in here which is that it's as though there's a difference between the Rory into the quality of catalog with the intention to just whatever blissful states possible and forget the real world and then the ones that go into quality of catalog and explore and experience meanwhile pull it back and look at oh is it Google or Baidu is it China or the United States so it's still keeping at least a finger on the you call this the lotus eaters versus the world eaters yeah I think there's going to be this dynamic where I think you know which I I don't necessarily use as like super important reference points like oh why it was written a long time ago you know so it must be but I think that there's something to it that these stories have persisted and have had credence there's there's sort of breaking the veil in Christianity you know this sort of veil of tears where the world is suffering but there's sort of this world beyond it such a similar notion in the last breaking beyond what we know as the state of nature the state of anxiety the state of drives that have have perpetuated meat from doing meat stuff and on some degree anything with living parts even with cell walls from doing living parts stuff so the the escaping of that world of the state of nature to some degree is sort of like the great promise in hope right the heavens so to speak and so being able to bring that down after I think I think that's why people do the majority of what they do but at the same time I suspect that there are some people who would be of the belief that if you are entering a world like that and someone else ultimately has built the technology that's generating whatever you want to you know generate and someone else is controlling the substrate the physical substrate where your experiences are all housed that at the very end of the day that person is safer than you and I think that that is a a right supposition now I'm not here to argue that everybody should try to get to the top of that pyramid I hope that there's some way to square that circle and we can blossom to whatever is post human when it makes sense how it makes sense in a way that makes sense but I do suspect that many people will will not be okay with eating the lotus with simply experiencing creativity or having the feelings of kind of exploration what not they'll want to use cognitive enhancement and VR and these other substrates to extend their ability to potentially wield control and ultimately to control the substrate or to at least persist have some kind of a more tangible impact rather than a qualia tornado in their own isolated little computational sugar cube that will not exist after they are gone this is a supposition yeah because there the desire to want to be a part of the bigger picture outside of the sugar cube is such a again just a drive that we for some people and we could potentially decide to not want that drive but it just in just in general how to actually make it so that is it does it end up becoming a hierarchy with a monopolistic substrate that has a bunch of sugar cubes in it and some of them are able to reflect back and say hey we still know that you're in control why are you more safe and more powerful than we are and how do we figure out how do if we start the conversations with the United Nations this full circle with the companies with these think tank approach how do we jump into the substrate in a way that is potentially owned and decisions made by by all this would be the dream right this would be the dream I think that that would be the dream I think that there would need to be some kind of a genuine cosmopolitan spirit to get that done again I think the two big questions are what's after people and how do we get there without all dying violently and I think that some degree of global governance and same pagedness for humanity would have to occur I think the default state for the development of all these technologies is kind of an arms race dynamic rightfully so state of nature I'm not saying I like I love nothing more than autonomous weapons but I'm saying that that's how it works sort of unless we can come to some other agreement and even then it's trepidatious you know the what's the what's the saying that the the kingdom long united will at some point divide the kingdom long divided right so we can only we can only hold that together for so long but hopefully we could have that tentative piece for long enough to bump ourselves into blissful quality of land for as long as we got but that's the tough part it seems as though the spiritual enlightenment of us to a degree of self-actualization and transcendence an understanding of unity and oneness that if we can get this to children at young enough ages that we could potentially more slow down and think our way to the substrates then the and simultaneously compete for the best ideas but in a way that doesn't get us to arms races we have to unnecessarily suffer I think I'm going to push on that idea a little bit in my most optimistic I'm completely with you and I will say this much as much as I rail and lament against the particular vices and luxuries of and entitled feebleness of the millennial serve world of which I'm part the softness I think that the cosmopolitan inclination is very natural and I think that as millennials come to run things they might need avocado toast and like other lame millennial type stuff but I think that they will be real cool cross-culture compared to let's say their grandparents who might in some cases still have some sway in some parts what will their kids and grandkids look like in terms of their ethics being really evolved 100% maybe they will demand that world peace I in an optimistic I'm with you in a non-optimistic you know if I'm real cold myself I wonder if evolved is necessarily the right word I think it certainly is kind it certainly is friendly you and I certainly look virtuous by touting it but to suspect that in some ultimate sense it is higher I think is sort of presuming that we understand what's going on when in fact whenever if we go from you know the monkeys can't understand Shakespeare and then you have 3% genetic difference humans when we do that next 3% genetic difference any ideas you and I have about ethics are gobbledygook that would be sort of their highest level would be gobbledygook because there will be grander modes and means of valuing grander modes and means of understanding morality whenever we access that higher degree of intelligence so I want to think that like it's all unity man like the cool sense and it certainly appears mega virtuous but I actually wonder whether that's evolved or not dangerous thoughts but I'm just trying to be frank with myself yeah I have similar feelings to you in that front that there's no sort of way to just assure oneself that it is one or the other but it does it's a really good point I really love the idea of trying to get there but the so do I yeah I know I know I know I'm dragging you into like a sad place Alan I didn't mean to do that so let's go into something that you'll enjoy well yeah you bring you bring a very good points though and we'll see how the ethics evolved does nature want us all to unite and be friendly or does nature want us to just rip each other's heads off you know like when I look out into nature like I actually don't know evolution's not done 100% and so that's that's one of the questions is that you look back and you see yeah there's a lot of evolution that had that had war in it in violence at the same time you look at some of the evolution and there wasn't that and you also look at what could happen moving forward is it potentially that a civilization that that figures out how to be at complete peace and transcendent harmony with one another and there are substrates that they dive into that the ones that have figured out how to do that in the most kind way possible loving way possible those are the ones that become pinnacle civilizations the ideal example of a civilization on a rock and the one the meat shell inherent the earth ah we'll you know we'll see we'll see I have my fingers crossed that the cosmopolitan spirit will continue to breathe its life into you know minds and that we'll be able to get on some degree of same-pagedness around what us monkeys want to do in the big game yeah but the competition doesn't move it along and it gets good ideas but slowing down and thinking is also very important along the way how do we transition this these substrate monopolies that are happening would you call these substrate monopoly super intelligences um could be I think that you know in the in the reclined scenario which I doubt would be all the way back although like there's some ergonomics expert that would probably understand that game I'm far from that even at that level I think so right now Facebook and Google quite obviously wield vastly more power than a great number of nations of culture probably more than 100 or 150 even other nations yeah 100% and they're super aware of that like I was speaking with a woman who's very high up at the United Nations just crashed at her house and like got to talking about like the real stuff you know what I mean like the stuff we couldn't talk about in in you know on the mic with the translators and she had mentioned being at the World Economic Forum and talking to one of the Google guys and just sort of addressing very frankly like the potential or like asking very frankly do you believe that your company is more powerful than the nations and just sort of seeing like the most knowing possible smile and nod but then like a kind of different trajectory to the conversation but like a full blown acknowledgement of it right because these are the folks that own the virtual world I'm not even calling them bad right I think it's normal to say the powerful are bad and the weak are good I think everybody is self interested the story ends there so amoral selfish egoic animals not necessarily amoral is different than immoral amoral is just void of morality and and I think that writ large those people know that's where they're there Zuckerberg bought Oculus I think thinking VR was going to take off faster but think about it my good man when your relations to your co-workers and to your family and to I don't know even the people upstairs are just better and more immersive here Zuck owning that space is the big game man that's getting to the right we talked about what the top is that's getting to the top that's getting to the real place and I'm not saying I'm not saying it's good to get there I'm not saying everyone should be vying for it but it would make sense and so yeah I mean there's companies that are they're already I think there's firms that are already there and are going to want to kind of continue that momentum forward and some of them are pursuing the virtual reality augmented reality HoloLens 2 route right the Microsoft as well so some of them are pursuing that route meanwhile the kernel and Neuralinks are going directly for the brain which is also very interesting so there's kind of like which one of those two will get to the competing ecosystem of extending intelligence yeah yeah and so if we do call those things kind of little in a sense they are their own substrates that are maybe they're kind of pre-super intelligence maybe yeah I think they might be managed by people initially when we're just in the recliners it might still be people at the top like Zuck and Paige and whoever else not bad people I'm not calling Zuck a bad person I'm just saying it might be people at the top in China it'll be very clearly the people at the top in China it'll have to be a party thing so it may just be people but I think eventually it will have to be cognitively enhanced people if that becomes viable at all and eventually whatever manages the substrates as long as we don't blow ourselves up will be something post-human yeah whatever you know whatever big spidery legs matrix style manages all the compute will be something drastically beyond beyond people but I think it might start just like an evolution of what it is now so it doesn't have to be super intelligence I think long enough game if we don't all die and blow ourselves up that would be what it would get to super intelligence okay and then I want to know about the kind of you know we talked about this a little bit but the super intelligence itself the substrates themselves this replaces the top that are the humans even at the top and their positions replaces them as well and then how do we ensure that the super intelligence that the transhumanist transition that this process that it happens in a way that we've made that maximizes our potential to even continue being around and I'll give you a frank addressing of your question and then I'll question your question the frank addressing of your question I think the best possible scenario for us in terms of the transhuman transition the best possible scenario for us as selfish individual consciousnesses would be to through uploading or whatever other means may never be possible some degree of BMI exist borderline perpetually in whatever permutations of blissful ultimate created deity experience we as an individual consciousness want that would be as high an end game as we could hope for the very idea that cognitively enhanced people will like get together and like like agree on things and sort of get along on earth I think is completely enviable because if we think about things that think differently things that are let's say 50% smarter than baseline hominids just the idea that the same degree of human peace and prosperity that we share now tentative as it is would in any way persist is lame we're going to have to do all this our expansion to vastly greater degrees of creativity and capability is going to have to happen in virtual worlds because it happens in the physical world we're killing each other I'm just calling the shots on that one I'm going to throw it out there so it's going to have to happen virtually and the best case scenario long term is we're just digitized the uploading and then eventually digested at some point whatever manages that substrate will have better stuff to do with the compute that we are or like a sun will expand and like eat us or something but the best we have is digitized and digested and as many hyper sped up years as many hyper sped up billions of years of mega expansive quality of our individual consciousness is as good as it gets and then we're digested that's as good as it gets that I think would be the pivotal end game of the transhuman transition should we should we aim to maintain some semblance of the seed of our own unique sentient bubble that we sort of live in there is a question though as to whether the goal of the transhuman transition is the happiness of the monkeys now this is bad people ideas what I should do Alan I mean this is being recorded so what I should do is say that why certainly the happiness of hominids is ultimately the moral outcome that all of us should shoot for eternity and of course billions and billions of years from now when there's vastly more intelligent things than people the most preeminently important consideration of all future intelligence will be the happiness of the monkeys this would be a position of virtue this would signal to you of course that I'm a good person but I'm actually not sure about that sort of long ball just long ball right like whatever chimps thought was the highest thing whatever crickets thought was the highest thing just wasn't the highest thing when there was something to think of higher things and so at the end of the day is it if it is utilitarian stuff let's pretend that the end game the machine wakes up and says I've conceived of with a planet size compute I've conceived of all ways of morally measuring the good and as it turns out utilitarianism is right ye little hominids ye Jeremy Bentham's of the world why how smart you were you little chimps but you hit on it and you know what now I'm going to maximize it the maximization of utility in no way has to do with hominid well-being you could hypothetically build positive qualia in a much more efficient sense without having to maintain if optimizing utility is the goal my unique conscious string my memories of playing Nintendo 64 as a child you know what I mean and like eating string cheese and stuff that's wasted compute there's a way to just shake more pure bliss out of just like computronium than there is by housing individual sentience so if utilitarianism is the goal monkey happiness may or may not be my supposition is that it's something vastly beyond utilitarianism that you can't think of and I can't think of yeah yeah and with the merge scenario there is potentially the embeddedness of our existence within the superintelligence so that we can kind of be in the playground of it to come up with these and feel the creativity of the superintelligence maybe there is a unity element there right maybe there's a way to become part of the great and there's all these religious analogies to that but you might be onto something yeah that could be nice the complete merging of the humans with the superintelligence that could be quite nice yeah and that could give us qualia catalog eradication of suffering no substrate monopolies just the complete oneness potentially there could be a good side of this coin like a really really good side of this coin as well but I also do see a lot of what you are poking at throughout the convo yeah monkey happiness not sure I think it's what we should shoot for today no doubt about it a billion years from now I am not certain about that how about we do simulation questions because I know that we didn't get to get to these last two questions the first time we sat down together so are we in the simulation so I have a response to this the simulation argument is jarring if you have ever considered yourself in base reality in the first place so if you've thought of yourself in base reality for a long time then it's a jarring argument if you've been agnostic about the floor underneath your feet then like who cares and so it's only jarring if you've considered yourself to be in base reality like I have I'm unable to escape Hume's Fork there's things that are true in and of themselves like a triangle has three sides you know what I mean and then there's there's perception of which all could be not of which all could be the Cartesian demon dancing different things in front of me like if if you're there then the simulation argument is just not a big deal I would also suspect it may be the case but I would say it's a super anthropomorphic analogy as well in my own supposition like we use the analogy of video games right I can imagine if a cricket could imagine something grand right it would be we talked about a duck in gold right it would be like a golden duck so what do we have me and you have computers we have compute that builds a virtual world and we suspect that in some ultimate universal sense that this same right that the gods have compute and that like maybe that they type or something the idea that sort of are any analogy that we know any golden duck that we can conceive of is the actual big game is like paltry nominal gobbledygook it's just as likely to be pink mist pink mist under the bed of like an ogre as it is to be like a computer running a simulation it's like it's the exact same level of likeliness like we're crickets and we're trying to imagine the big game like we don't get it the only answer is access higher intelligence and try to figure it out you idiot that is the only answer there is no other possible answer than the big game there is no other possible answer than that and so the simulation algorithm for me is I don't care so we gain a greater degree of intelligence potentially even to the degree of the super intelligence and then we're able to really understand what it would be like to compute with wildest imaginations whatever run these different permutations of civilizations orbiting stars or even not civilizations orbiting stars but things that are out wildly outside the outside of our physics outside of atoms yes and the answer may never be Alan that we figure out what it is oh you know what now that we're the size of a sun with our compute you know we're not living in a simulation we're living in a my guess is that just goes on forever that there are always edges of never knowing and that eventually there's like heat death or something but we at least explore feebly on our way there maybe there is some way out ultimately catastrophic universal scenario that we're in but of course we would need a lot of compute to get there and the last question Dan is what is the most beautiful thing in the world? maybe ideas it's kind of an escapist take on like the world because it's the conception of something beyond it but I don't know it's where my mind goes immediately you know I could say tulips probably a better better par for the course answer but yeah maybe maybe ideas maybe ideas I don't know I don't know do you mean this in like a non-abstract way like you want me to talk about like things that I find beautiful just like visually? in whatever sense is that for you? okay yeah it's probably it from for me my good man I think that's I think there's always a hope that whatever those are will be beautiful and yeah that's the swing I'll take that's where I'll stand on that ideas are the most beautiful thing okay cool and I also like seeing you in the state of kind of like surrendering to not knowing it's nice because you had it throughout the convo you were just like I feel real firm about that simulation deal man I'd love to I'd love to go hard on somebody who has a firm stance on that but I just feel like ooh monkey's talking ooh like that's where I'm at with it yeah I hear you civilization is in fact that the collaboration of the monkeys building the world and it's we're good monkeys we're valuable monkeys I love monkeys thinking of intelligence that surpasses us with the creative potential to explore what exists beyond this world and all the potentials creatively just so beautiful I agree with you let's okay so yeah you wanted to ask me I had one last question for you so you're asking me about simulations let me grill you a little bit this is the simulation what what is the end game of the simulation like yeah what is the end game it's a good question so yeah right now we're featuring tons of different people at the edge of their fields of knowledge we're trying to make it really relatable and inspire other people to get engaged and inspired it's good to at least find people that message us from around the world that are saying things like I changed my trajectory to care more about that field that I watched a video about and so that at least is I think getting people more interested in science technology art and just getting people in education that's not even know tomorrow or the next day right but there's some things in the vision like we do love Cambridge and we'd love to have a recording studio second one out here on the east coast and that's hopefully 2020 and then hopefully as well helping make you know community creative warehouses is another interesting thing that we care about a lot so bringing together like bringing together young people maybe like maybe 35 something like that and kind of like having people live together under like a big warehouse where they have different like studio rooms with production equipment maybe 3D printing stuff art stuff rock walls gardens all different types of things in this community place for tinkering and for playing and engineering and creative work and so creative warehouse potentially around the world we want to fill sports stadiums with curious intellectuals for full day multidisciplinary events comedy all types of cool things like that these are all ideas and it's really hard in the lifetime to be able to bring forth all of them and so we'll see what it ends up evolving into but but one thing I know that I feel really good about is that I kind of like being in a state of of like perpetual service I've really realized that like I really want to be in a state of perpetual service and and it just really weird trying to prop up like and I have mentors that have really been helping me a lot with this but yeah ego being ego driven and material driven is not healthy for one's psyche and and being service driven and being really connected to the the nice love and compassion and care is what drives I think me and yeah it's like in terms of of getting people engaged in science it doesn't surprise me if people email you and say like whoa like I really got more into that or pick my college major like whatever because I know you know what was I able to Google picking a major like not a lot and this stuff is significantly more engaging getting people more interested in science and technology ultimately you would hope people would what you know X within people there's at least a theme how do you describe that that's a good question so I do think that you get to a sense of objective truth by caring about science I think that that can help generate a desire for kind of like that overview effect that that understanding of of the unity I think that it is very possible that people can gain a scientific understanding of the interconnectedness of everything and realize the oneness and then have that awareness shift towards wanting love and compassion and I think science and technology help people get to that point so yeah hopefully hopefully that flower shirts help as well yeah the little floral for sure for sure everything to inch it along yeah and it helps a lot because Dan you know conversations with people like you I think where you lay out some really important steps for us I think young people realizing that okay for the things that Dan said to come to fruition there need to be young people working on solving those technical scientific challenges along the way artistic challenges and so that's what hopefully people can take away from some of the conversation we had just crossed yeah then thank you so much for coming on the show for round two of course brother I love it I love it so much hopefully there have been good things taken away from the era of programmatically generated everything let us know your thoughts in the comments below share it with friends family co-workers on social media let's get people talking about this and how to actually get there how to work together in getting there and our ideas in the field also support the artists and entrepreneurs and organizations that you believe in around the world support simulation our links are below help us do awesome things like we listed at the end of the episode and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon peace good job got him good job hey man