#370 – Edward Frenkel: Reality is a Paradox – Mathematics, Physics, Truth & Love

Scott Aaronson is a professor at UT Austin, director of its Quantum Information Center, and previously a professor at MIT. His research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and computational complexity theory more generally. 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, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”. This episode is also supported by the Techmeme Ride Home podcast. Get it on Apple Podcasts, on its website, or find it by searching “Ride Home” in your podcast app. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. 00:00 – Introduction 05:07 – Role of philosophy in science 29:27 – What is a quantum computer? 41:12 – Quantum decoherence (noise in quantum information) 49:22 – Quantum computer engineering challenges 51:00 – Moore’s Law 56:33 – Quantum supremacy 1:12:18 – Using quantum computers to break cryptography 1:17:11 – Practical application of quantum computers 1:22:18 – Quantum machine learning, questionable claims, and cautious optimism 1:30:53 – Meaning of life

17 Feb 20201h 34min

Vladimir Vapnik is the co-inventor of support vector machines, support vector clustering, VC theory, and many foundational ideas in statistical learning. He was born in the Soviet Union, worked at the Institute of Control Sciences in Moscow, then in the US, worked at AT&T, NEC Labs, Facebook AI Research, and now is a professor at Columbia University. His work has been cited over 200,000 times. 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, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. 00:00 – Introduction 02:55 – Alan Turing: science and engineering of intelligence 09:09 – What is a predicate? 14:22 – Plato’s world of ideas and world of things 21:06 – Strong and weak convergence 28:37 – Deep learning and the essence of intelligence 50:36 – Symbolic AI and logic-based systems 54:31 – How hard is 2D image understanding? 1:00:23 – Data 1:06:39 – Language 1:14:54 – Beautiful idea in statistical theory of learning 1:19:28 – Intelligence and heuristics 1:22:23 – Reasoning 1:25:11 – Role of philosophy in learning theory 1:31:40 – Music (speaking in Russian) 1:35:08 – Mortality

14 Feb 20201h 45min

Jim Keller is a legendary microprocessor engineer, having worked at AMD, Apple, Tesla, and now Intel. He’s known for his work on the AMD K7, K8, K12 and Zen microarchitectures, Apple A4, A5 processors, and co-author of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect. 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, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. 00:00 – Introduction 02:12 – Difference between a computer and a human brain 03:43 – Computer abstraction layers and parallelism 17:53 – If you run a program multiple times, do you always get the same answer? 20:43 – Building computers and teams of people 22:41 – Start from scratch every 5 years 30:05 – Moore’s law is not dead 55:47 – Is superintelligence the next layer of abstraction? 1:00:02 – Is the universe a computer? 1:03:00 – Ray Kurzweil and exponential improvement in technology 1:04:33 – Elon Musk and Tesla Autopilot 1:20:51 – Lessons from working with Elon Musk 1:28:33 – Existential threats from AI 1:32:38 – Happiness and the meaning of life

5 Feb 20201h 35min

David Chalmers is a philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and consciousness. He is perhaps best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness which could be stated as “why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?” 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, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. 00:00 – Introduction 02:23 – Nature of reality: Are we living in a simulation? 19:19 – Consciousness in virtual reality 27:46 – Music-color synesthesia 31:40 – What is consciousness? 51:25 – Consciousness and the meaning of life 57:33 – Philosophical zombies 1:01:38 – Creating the illusion of consciousness 1:07:03 – Conversation with a clone 1:11:35 – Free will 1:16:35 – Meta-problem of consciousness 1:18:40 – Is reality an illusion? 1:20:53 – Descartes’ evil demon 1:23:20 – Does AGI need conscioussness? 1:33:47 – Exciting future 1:35:32 – Immortality

29 Jan 20201h 39min

Cristos Goodrow is VP of Engineering at Google and head of Search and Discovery at YouTube (aka YouTube Algorithm). 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, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. 00:00 – Introduction 03:26 – Life-long trajectory through YouTube 07:30 – Discovering new ideas on YouTube 13:33 – Managing healthy conversation 23:02 – YouTube Algorithm 38:00 – Analyzing the content of video itself 44:38 – Clickbait thumbnails and titles 47:50 – Feeling like I’m helping the YouTube algorithm get smarter 50:14 – Personalization 51:44 – What does success look like for the algorithm? 54:32 – Effect of YouTube on society 57:24 – Creators 59:33 – Burnout 1:03:27 – YouTube algorithm: heuristics, machine learning, human behavior 1:08:36 – How to make a viral video? 1:10:27 – Veritasium: Why Are 96,000,000 Black Balls on This Reservoir? 1:13:20 – Making clips from long-form podcasts 1:18:07 – Moment-by-moment signal of viewer interest 1:20:04 – Why is video understanding such a difficult AI problem? 1:21:54 – Self-supervised learning on video 1:25:44 – What does YouTube look like 10, 20, 30 years from now?

25 Jan 20201h 31min

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner in economics, professor at CUNY, and columnist at the New York Times. His academic work centers around international economics, economic geography, liquidity traps, and currency crises. 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, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. 00:00 – Introduction 03:44 – Utopia from an economics perspective 04:51 – Competition 06:33 – Well-informed citizen 07:52 – Disagreements in economics 09:57 – Metrics of outcomes 13:00 – Safety nets 15:54 – Invisible hand of the market 21:43 – Regulation of tech sector 22:48 – Automation 25:51 – Metric of productivity 30:35 – Interaction of the economy and politics 33:48 – Universal basic income 36:40 – Divisiveness of political discourse 42:53 – Economic theories 52:25 – Starting a system on Mars from scratch 55:11 – International trade 59:08 – Writing in a time of radicalization and Twitter mobs

21 Jan 20201h 3min

Ayanna Howard is a roboticist and professor at Georgia Tech, director of Human-Automation Systems lab, with research interests in human-robot interaction, assistive robots in the home, therapy gaming apps, and remote robotic exploration of extreme environments. 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, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. 00:00 – Introduction 02:09 – Favorite robot 05:05 – Autonomous vehicles 08:43 – Tesla Autopilot 20:03 – Ethical responsibility of safety-critical algorithms 28:11 – Bias in robotics 38:20 – AI in politics and law 40:35 – Solutions to bias in algorithms 47:44 – HAL 9000 49:57 – Memories from working at NASA 51:53 – SpotMini and Bionic Woman 54:27 – Future of robots in space 57:11 – Human-robot interaction 1:02:38 – Trust 1:09:26 – AI in education 1:15:06 – Andrew Yang, automation, and job loss 1:17:17 – Love, AI, and the movie Her 1:25:01 – Why do so many robotics companies fail? 1:32:22 – Fear of robots 1:34:17 – Existential threats of AI 1:35:57 – Matrix 1:37:37 – Hang out for a day with a robot

17 Jan 20201h 40min

Daniel Kahneman is winner of the Nobel Prize in economics for his integration of economic science with the psychology of human behavior, judgment and decision-making. He is the author of the popular book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” that summarizes in an accessible way his research of several decades, often in collaboration with Amos Tversky, on cognitive biases, prospect theory, and happiness. The central thesis of this work is a dichotomy between two modes of thought: “System 1” is fast, instinctive and emotional; “System 2” is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The book delineates cognitive biases associated with each type of thinking. 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, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. 00:00 – Introduction 02:36 – Lessons about human behavior from WWII 08:19 – System 1 and system 2: thinking fast and slow 15:17 – Deep learning 30:01 – How hard is autonomous driving? 35:59 – Explainability in AI and humans 40:08 – Experiencing self and the remembering self 51:58 – Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl 54:46 – How much of human behavior can we study in the lab? 57:57 – Collaboration 1:01:09 – Replication crisis in psychology 1:09:28 – Disagreements and controversies in psychology 1:13:01 – Test for AGI 1:16:17 – Meaning of life

14 Jan 20201h 19min