Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…For sure. Yeah. In so doing, help increase the chance that we can propagate the flame of human consciousness out towards the stars. And I think another important one, if we fail to do that. For me, it’s propagating, maintaining the full diversity, and richness, and complexity, and expansiveness of human knowledge. So, if we destroy ourselves, it would make me feel a little bit okay if the human knowledge persists. It just triggered me to say something really interesting, which is when we talked earlier about translating and using machines to translate, we mostly talked about small languages and translating into English, but I always like to tell this story of something inconsequential, really. I was in Norway, in Bergen, Norway, where every year they’ve got this annual festival called [foreign language 03:11:33], which is young groups drumming, and they have a drumming competition. It’s the 17 sectors of the city, and they’ve been doing it for a couple hundred years or whatever. They wrote about it in the three languages of Norway. And then from there, it was translated into English, into German, et cetera, et cetera. And so, what I love about that story is what it reminds me is this machine translation goes both ways. And when you talk about the richness and broadness of human culture, we’re already seeing some really great pieces of this. So, like Korean soap operas, really popular, not with me, but with people. Imagine taking a very famous, very popular, very well known Korean drama. I literally mean now, we’re just about there technologically where we use a machine to redub it in English in an automated way, including digitally editing the faces so it doesn’t look dubbed. And so, suddenly you say, “Oh, wow, here’s a piece of …” It’s the Korean equivalent of maybe it’s Friends as a comedy, or maybe it’s Succession, just to be very contemporary. It’s something that really impacted a lot of people, and they really loved it, and we have literally no idea what it’s about. And suddenly, it’s like, “Wow.” Music, street music from wherever in the world can suddenly become accessible to us all in new ways. It’s so cool.…

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