Lex Fridman: preference

Transcript context

…Even the same content. I don’t read things anymore as much as I can on like a screen, I print everything out and I sit at a table and I read it. I can read it on my iPad, I can read it on my laptop. I print it all out because my attention is different. And the same goes for AI, whether we’re talking about this kind of research, it’s more distinct and rigorous. And the other space that I do every single day is programming. I’m definitely becoming a worse programmer by using AI offloading because it actually works really well there. I’m becoming worse at creative thinking at what you’re saying, writing the first draft, which require that skill, that first little leap, that little mini leap into the creative genius that we all do every single day. AI is not able to do that, and it’s definitely doling that. All right, we covered a lot of ground today. But on the note of optimism, what gives you hope about the future of this great nation of ours, the future of America? Looking out in the next few years and the next few decades, centuries, when we colonize the solar system and beyond or we could just stick to the next couple of decades. Sure. Despite the fact that our book is a deep diagnosis of modern liberalism with a ton of criticism of the last half decade in politics, I am at root a profound optimist about everything just at a general personality sense. To a certain extent, a question like this is attempting to elicit a little bit of what can be considered analysis of the world. But you’re also eliciting what is fundamentally like personality, like what makes you optimistic? I’ve just always been a real optimist. I’m optimistic about science and technology, especially in the realm of biomedical science in a big way. I think if you look at what’s happening right now in mRNA cancer vaccines, in CAR T-cell therapy for redesigning T-cells to attack cancers. If you look at the GLP-1 drug revolution and some of these studies that have been done on the fact that GLP-1 drugs, while they were initially synthesized from lizard venom to help people with type two diabetes turned out to have these effects that seem to reduce body-wide inflammation. That not only rewires our minds and makes it easier for people’s desired sense of moderation to be actualized. So people who want to eat more fruits and vegetables seem to find it easier to eat more fruits and vegetables when they’re on GLP-1 drugs. But also because there’s probably a lot of neurological issues that are fundamentally issues of inflammation, including maybe dementia and Alzheimer’s. We might have accidentally from the tongue of a lizard, a partial medicine for Alzheimer’s disease. The ability of science to connect these dots in the cosmos just absolutely thrills and fascinates me. And I hope that we get better at making those connections. And while I have a lot of fears about AI, many of them shared by Ezra, I am really interested in the possibility of AI being useful for synthesizing large bodies of knowledge to allow people to make cross-domain comparisons. I think a lot of inventions in tech history are essentially ingenious recombinations of ideas. Like to a certain extent, you look at something as fundamental or archetypal as Thomas Edison inventing the incandescent light bulb. What did he do? He just tested 10,000 different materials and figured out that actually it was like a very special kind of bamboo that burned for the right amount of time and said, “Boom, I did it. I made the incandescent light bulb.”…

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