Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…That’s a great question, and it depends on what kind of insights and what we’re going to find that out. Because it’s hard to think about something that doesn’t quite exist yet, I could just think about something, take a step back. It’s a little bit like I’m trying understand four dimensions so you go back to three dimensions. Go to something you can imagine. You can say a lot of the things in a very different level about the internet. You could say has the internet helped do things? It definitely took on a life of its own in some sense, but it’s also something that we’re able to tame. I know that I, myself wouldn’t have been able to write books if the internet didn’t exist because I wouldn’t have had the time to go to the library and look everything up. It helped me enormously. In some sense, AI could be that. In a very nice world, it could be a tool that helps us go a step further than we would and a lot more efficiently. It’s already done that to some extent. Or it could be like the parts of the internet that we can control that are ruining politics or whatever. There’s certainly a lot of indications that can do that. Then there are even bigger things that people speculate about AI being able to do its own things, but in terms of actually figuring things out, we’re in the early stages. Yeah, there’s several directions here. One is on the theorem prover side, Wolfram Alpha where everything’s much more precise, and we have large language model type of stuff. One of the limitations of those is it seems to come up with convincing looking things, which we don’t know if it’s true or not, and that’s a big problem for physics. Large language models are more or less generalizations of stuff that we have. There’s still breakthroughs in AI waiting to happen, and maybe they are happening and maybe they’ll be good, maybe not, but that’s not quite the same. Maybe in some cases, it’s just pattern recognition that leads to important things, but sometimes it could be something more insightful than that that I can’t even put my finger on. It forces us to… We don’t really understand how smart we are. We don’t understand how we think about things all that well, actually. But one thing is true though, we are a lot more efficient right now than computers and coming up with things, we require a lot less energy to do that. If computers figure out how to do that, then it’s going to be at a totally different ball game. Here are clearly kinds of connections that we don’t know how we’re making, but we are making them. That’s going to be interesting. I say we’re in early stages, but this is changing very rapidly. Right now, I don’t think that it’s actually discovered new laws of physics, but could it in the future? Maybe it can.…

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