Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…I don't think there's much question that AI is going to be at least as transformative as nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. And it's scaring the hell out of a lot of people and a lot of other people are putting their heads in the sand. And others are saying, let's live it around with laws, which certainly we should do. We've tried to do that with nuclear weapons and have had some success. But people have no idea what's coming, do they? Yeah. One thing I wanted to ask is — Some of these scientists didn't see this coming. I think Fermi said you could never refine uranium and get 235 but then some of these other scientists saw it coming. And I was actually impressed by a few of them who accurately predicted the year that we’ll have the atomic bomb. Another one was, Russia is five to 10 years behind. So I'm curious, what made some of these scientists really good at forecasting the development of this technology and its maturity and what made some either too pessimistic or too optimistic? Is there some pattern you noticed among the ones who could see the progression of the technology? That's a good question. Well, the experience that I've had in working with scientists, physicists, is that they really are not very interested in history or in the future. They're interested in the Now, where the work is, where the cutting edge is. They'd have to devote quite a bit of energy to projecting in the future. Of course there have been a few. One thinks of some of the guys who wrote science fiction, some of the guys who wrote essays and so forth about where we were going. And if you ask them, particularly later on in their careers, when their basic work is already done, and I remember talking to a Nobel Laureate in another line of science, but he said, I would never be a graduate student connecting up with the Nobel Prize winner because they've already done their best work. And he was one so he was talking about himself, too. It takes a certain mentality to do that. And maybe scientists aren't the best ones to do it. Alvarez told me, he said, you know, I was always a snoop and I would poke around Berkeley in the various drawers of the benches in the laboratory. He said, one day I was poking around and I found this little glass cylinder about the size of a Petri dish with some wires inside. He said, and I realized it was the first cyclotron. They just put it in a drawer. I asked, so where is it now? He said, it's in the Smithsonian, of course. Where else would it be? I talked to the guy who invented the first laser and actually held one in my hand. He was an engineer at one of the big telephone companies. He said, the first laser is supposedly in the Smithsonian but they don't have it. They got one in the lab and I took my first one home. You want to see it? I said, God, of course. We went to the credenza in his dining room and he opened the drawer and pulled out a little box. Inside it was basically a cylinder of aluminum about the size of a little film can, which he opened up and took out a man-made ruby cylinder that was half-silvered on each end, surrounded by a very high-intensity flash bulb. That was it. It was this beautiful, simple machine. He said they didn't get the right one. I said, why didn't you give them the right one? He said, they didn't ask me. He was angry all his life because he wasn't included in the Nobel prizes. It went to the theoretician to first theorize the laser, but he built the first laser and there it was.…

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