Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, it’s a special moment and it was great for Lee Sedol. I think it’s in a way they were inspiring each other. We as a team were inspired by Lee Sedol’s brilliance and nobleness. Then maybe he got inspired by what AlphaGo was doing to then conjure this incredible inspirational moment, captured very well in the documentary about it. And I think that’ll continue in many domains where there’s this, at least again for the foreseeable future, of the humans bringing in their ingenuity and asking the right question, let’s say, and then utilizing these tools in a way that then cracks a problem. Yeah. As the AI become smarter and smarter, one of the interesting questions we can ask ourselves is what makes humans special? It does feel perhaps biased that we humans are deeply special. I don’t know if it’s our intelligence, it could be something else, that other thing that’s outside the mad dreams of reason. I think that’s what I’ve always imagined when I was a kid and starting on this journey of I was of course fascinated by things like consciousness, did a neuroscience PhD to look at how the brain works, especially imagination and memory. I focused on the hippocampus and it’s sort of going to be interesting. I always thought the best way, of course, one can philosophize about it and have thought experiments and maybe even do actual experiments like you do in neuroscience on real brains. But in the end, I always imagine that building AI, a kind of intelligent artifact, and then comparing that to the human mind and seeing what the differences were would be the best way to uncover what’s special about the human mind, if indeed there is anything special. And I suspect there probably is, but it’s going to be hard to… I think this journey we’re on will help us understand that and define that. And there may be a difference between carbon based substrates that we are and silicon ones when they process information. One of the best definitions I like of consciousness is it’s the way information feels when we process it, right?…

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