#79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution

Garry Kasparov is considered by many to be the greatest chess player of all time. From 1986 until his retirement in 2005, he dominated the chess world, ranking world number 1 for most of those 19 years. While he has many historic matches against human chess players, in the long arc of history he may be remembered for his match again a machine, IBM's Deep Blue. His initial victories and eventual loss to Deep Blue captivated the imagination of the world of what role Artificial Intelligence systems may play in our civilization's future. That excitement inspired an entire generation of AI researchers, including myself, to get into the field. Garry is also a pro-democracy political thinker and leader, a fearless human-rights activist, and author of several books including How Life Imitates Chess which is a book on strategy and decision-making, Winter Is Coming which is a book articulating his opposition to the Putin regime, and Deep Thinking which is a book the role of both artificial intelligence and human intelligence in defining our future. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts or support it on Patreon. Here's the outline with timestamps for this episode (on some players you can click on the timestamp to jump to that point in the episode): 00:00 - Introduction 01:33 - Love of winning and hatred of losing 04:54 - Psychological elements 09:03 - Favorite games 16:48 - Magnus Carlsen 23:06 - IBM Deep Blue 37:39 - Morality 38:59 - Autonomous vehicles 42:03 - Fall of the Soviet Union 45:50 - Putin 52:25 - Life

27 Okt 201955min

Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist, futurist, and professor at the City College of New York. He is the author of many fascinating books on the nature of our reality and the future of our civilization. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts or support it on Patreon. Here's the outline with timestamps for this episode (on some players you can click on the timestamp to jump to that point in the episode): 00:00 - Introduction 01:14 - Contact with Aliens in the 21st century 06:36 - Multiverse and Nirvana 09:46 - String Theory 11:07 - Einstein's God 15:01 - Would aliens hurt us? 17:34 - What would aliens look like? 22:13 - Brain-machine interfaces 27:35 - Existential risk from AI 30:22 - Digital immortality 34:02 - Biological immortality 37:42 - Does mortality give meaning? 43:42 - String theory 47:16 - Universe as a computer and a simulation 53:16 - First human on Mars

22 Okt 20191h 1min

David Ferrucci led the team that built Watson, the IBM question-answering system that beat the top humans in the world at the game of Jeopardy. He is also the Founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist of Elemental Cognition, a company working engineer AI systems that understand the world the way people do. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on iTunes or support it on Patreon. Here's the outline with timestamps for this episode (on some players you can click on the timestamp to jump to that point in the episode): 00:00 - Introduction 01:06 - Biological vs computer systems 08:03 - What is intelligence? 31:49 - Knowledge frameworks 52:02 - IBM Watson winning Jeopardy 1:24:21 - Watson vs human difference in approach 1:27:52 - Q&A vs dialogue 1:35:22 - Humor 1:41:33 - Good test of intelligence 1:46:36 - AlphaZero, AlphaStar accomplishments 1:51:29 - Explainability, induction, deduction in medical diagnosis 1:59:34 - Grand challenges 2:04:03 - Consciousness 2:08:26 - Timeline for AGI 2:13:55 - Embodied AI 2:17:07 - Love and companionship 2:18:06 - Concerns about AI 2:21:56 - Discussion with AGI

11 Okt 20192h 24min

Gary Marcus is a professor emeritus at NYU, founder of Robust.AI and Geometric Intelligence, the latter is a machine learning company acquired by Uber in 2016. He is the author of several books on natural and artificial intelligence, including his new book Rebooting AI: Building Machines We Can Trust. Gary has been a critical voice highlighting the limits of deep learning and discussing the challenges before the AI community that must be solved in order to achieve artificial general intelligence. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on iTunes or support it on Patreon. Here's the outline with timestamps for this episode (on some players you can click on the timestamp to jump to that point in the episode): 00:00 - Introduction 01:37 - Singularity 05:48 - Physical and psychological knowledge 10:52 - Chess 14:32 - Language vs physical world 17:37 - What does AI look like 100 years from now 21:28 - Flaws of the human mind 25:27 - General intelligence 28:25 - Limits of deep learning 44:41 - Expert systems and symbol manipulation 48:37 - Knowledge representation 52:52 - Increasing compute power 56:27 - How human children learn 57:23 - Innate knowledge and learned knowledge 1:06:43 - Good test of intelligence 1:12:32 - Deep learning and symbol manipulation 1:23:35 - Guitar

3 Okt 20191h 25min

Peter Norvig is a research director at Google and the co-author with Stuart Russell of the book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach that educated and inspired a whole generation of researchers including myself to get into the field. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on iTunes or support it on Patreon. Here's the outline with timestamps for this episode (on some players you can click on the timestamp to jump to that point in the episode): 00:00 - Introduction 00:37 - Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach 09:11 - Covering the entire field of AI 15:42 - Expert systems and knowledge representation 18:31 - Explainable AI 23:15 - Trust 25:47 - Education - Intro to AI - MOOC 32:43 - Learning to program in 10 years 37:12 - Changing nature of mastery 40:01 - Code review 41:17 - How have you changed as a programmer 43:05 - LISP 47:41 - Python 48:32 - Early days of Google Search 53:24 - What does it take to build human-level intelligence 55:14 - Her 57:00 - Test of intelligence 58:41 - Future threats from AI 1:00:58 - Exciting open problems in AI

30 Sep 20191h 3min

Leonard Susskind is a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is widely regarded as one of the fathers of string theory and in general as one of the greatest physicists of our time both as a researcher and an educator. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on iTunes or support it on Patreon. Here's the outline with timestamps for this episode (on some players you can click on the timestamp to jump to that point in the episode): 00:00 - Introduction 01:02 - Richard Feynman 02:09 - Visualization and intuition 06:45 - Ego in Science 09:27 - Academia 11:18 - Developing ideas 12:12 - Quantum computers 21:37 - Universe as an information processing system 26:35 - Machine learning 29:47 - Predicting the future 30:48 - String theory 37:03 - Free will 39:26 - Arrow of time 46:39 - Universe as a computer 49:45 - Big bang 50:50 - Infinity 51:35 - First image of a black hole 54:08 - Questions within the reach of science 55:55 - Questions out of reach of science

26 Sep 201957min

Regina Barzilay is a professor at MIT and a world-class researcher in natural language processing and applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology, or the use of deep learning for early diagnosis, prevention and treatment of cancer. She has also been recognized for her teaching of several successful AI-related courses at MIT, including the popular Introduction to Machine Learning course. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on iTunes or support it on Patreon.

23 Sep 20191h 17min

Colin Angle is the CEO and co-founder of iRobot, a robotics company that for 29 years has been creating robots that operate successfully in the real world, not as a demo or on a scale of dozens, but on a scale of thousands and millions. As of this year, iRobot has sold more than 25 million robots to consumers, including the Roomba vacuum cleaning robot, the Braava floor mopping robot, and soon the Terra lawn mowing robot. 25 million robots successfully operating autonomously in people's homes to me is an incredible accomplishment of science, engineering, logistics, and all kinds of entrepreneurial innovation. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on iTunes or support it on Patreon.

19 Sep 201937min