Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…And that’s so fascinating because these are not the stochastic parrots. This is sort of a new form of emergence perhaps of novelty as you say, that exists by virtue of using old things to create new things. But it’s not as if the AGI has self-awareness. Maybe. Maybe it has, but as far as I can tell, it’s not as if AGI has approached consciousness or sentience just yet. It’s probably getting there. But the language appears to present itself as if there is sentience there, but it doesn’t. But I think that’s the problem at the point where this AGI sounds like me and speaks like me and behaves like me and feels like me and breathes like me and my daughter knows the AGI to be me as sort of the end of everything is the end of human agency. But what is the end of human agency to humans I think is the beginning of agency to nature. Because if you take all of this agency, if you take all of these language models that can summarize all of human civilization and consciousness and then upload that to nature and have nature now deal with that world of consciousness that it never had access to. Maybe through Eliezer’s lens, the sort of short-lived human becomes sort of a very long-lived humanlike, sentient, weeping willow. Maybe that’s the end in the beginning. And maybe on the more optimistic side for us humans, it’s a different form of existence where everything we create and everything we consume and everything we process is all made out of six elements and that’s it. And there’s only those six elements and not 118 elements. And it’s all the stuff of biology plus some fair amount of bits, genes, and atoms. A lot of Beethoven. A lot of Beethoven. I think the idea of connecting AGI to nature through your work is really fascinating. Sort of unlocking this incredible machinery of intelligence that is AGI and connecting it to the incredible machinery of wisdom that is nature has evolved through billions of years of pretty crazy intense evolution. Exactly. Again, I’m going back to directed evolution. Unlike this sort of high throughput brute force approach, if there is a way to utilize this synergy for diversity and diversification, what happens if you ask a ChatGPT question, but it takes 10,000 years to answer that question? What does that look like when you completely switch the timescale and you can afford the time to answer the question? And again, I don’t know, but that world to me is possibly amazing.…

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