Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Max Tegmark: Life 3.0 (#115)

Episode Date: February 9, 2021

Also on Youtube Max Tegmark is a physicist, cosmologist, and artificial intelligence - machine learning researcher. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute. He has been my mentor and friend for a LONG time :-) Professor Tegmark’s research is focused on precision cosmology, e.g., combining theoretical work with new measurements to place sharp constraints on cosmological models and their parameters. Early on, this challenge has lead him to work mainly on cosmology and quantum information. Although he’s continuing his cosmology work with the HERA collaboration, the main focus of his current research is on the physics of intelligence: using physics-based techniques to better understand biological and artificial intelligence (AI). Ultimately, this could culminate in what he calls an "AI Physicist" https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/01/1895/an-ai-physicist-can-derive-the-natural-laws-of-imagined-universes/ A native of Stockholm, Tegmark left Sweden in 1990 after receiving his B.Sc. in Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology (& a B.A. in Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics). His first academic venture beyond Scandinavia brought him to California, where he studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his PhD. in 1994. Tegmark is an author on more than 200 technical papers, and has been featured in dozens of science documentaries. He has received numerous awards for his research, including a Packard Fellowship (2001-06), Cottrell Scholar Award, an NSF Career grant. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.” His book "LIFE 3.0" was an instant New York Times Best Seller and one of Mark Cuban and Barack Obama's favorite books of 2017. Life 3.0 asks the question: "How will Artificial Intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human?" The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology—and there’s nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark. How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today’s kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle? Read Life 3.0 https://amzn.to/2YTDg9L 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:09 Disagreement with Noam Chomsky and the challenge of the Imitation Game 00:04:16 Will AI exceed human intelligence? 00:07:04 Should we fear AI? Are we being to passive? 00:09:02 Should we trust AI? What we should worry about. 00:11:21 Were you born tooearly to make good use of AI? Could AI avert war? 00:12:45 AI may have a democratizing impact. 00:17:55 The "Improve The News" experiment 00:26:19 What do you think about exponential change? Will tech solve humanity's problems? 00:30:31 What is your ethical will? 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📖 Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 📧Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 🎙️Listen on all other platforms: https://wavve.link/into A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishing from magic. Everybody, this is such an incredible treat, a thrill. It's why I got into doing these pandemic podcasts in the first place, to be honest, so that I could have conversations with my buddies and friends and mentors and teachers. And today, it's none other than Professor Max Tagmark of MIT, who I've known for 25 years or something like that. And he's really been a huge influence on me. I've stayed in his house.

I can't believe it. I knew him when he had little babies, and now they're all grown up. And he's known me since long before I had babies. Let's put it that way. Max, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, and it's so awesome to see you in these crazy times. And it's not just our kids that are growing up,

but that universe behind you on the sofa, our knowledge of it has grown up, too. I remember when we first wrote a paper together on taking pictures of our baby pictures of our universe. Oh boy, have the pictures gotten sharper and clearer since then, huh? Yeah, and largely thanks to the work that you have put in in this cosmic universe that we inhabit, and I just find it so amazing to keep up with the things that you're doing. I associate kind of the output of someone like you with a very young, you know, starting out,

wanting to get a job, wanting to get a new career, and yet you're making so much, much new content and productivity and doing so many new creative ideas. I first want to start with, though, something provocative, perhaps, and that is your neighbor. I have to check first, though, and say that, of course, as usual, you're being way too kind talking about my contributions to making those universe pictures better. When you were the one who's actually building experiments, taking the photos. We'll get into that. Yeah, we'll get into the experiment versus theory kind of debate. But first, I want to take you down the hallway as understand it at MIT, you guys bump it to each other frequently.

This is Noam Chomsky, your buddy. I don't know if you can recognize him, but there he is. So I'm working, by the way, in a Max tagmark finger puppets. So Unemployed Philosophers Guild who makes these finger puppets, please make one for Max because he deserves it. But I want to start off with your latest peregrinations into the field of artificial intelligence. You course wrote a runaway smash hit bestselling book, Life 3.0. That was one of President Obama's favorite books, one of Bill Gates' favorite books. one of my favorite books. We're in the same league, those three names. But I want to ask you,

when Noam was on my show this summer, I should say in 2020, he said something very provocative. In the context of Neurlink Elon Musk, who's a friend of yours, I know, he said it's not going to work because they're not asking the right questions. He said, the question of whether or not machines can think is too meaningless to contemplate. And I said, that's pretty provocative. And he said, no, that's not me saying it. It's Alan Turing. In this famous imitation paper, imitation game paper, Alan Turing said, the question is too meaningless to ask. How do you differ with Noam? Are you guys going to go on the faculty club and have a bare-knuckle brawl like we used to have? I already had a really fun debate with him in my office about the future of AI a while back.

And I have to say, I hugely respect Noam. And I think we'll come back to some of his amazing work on studying media bias. also later in our conversation. But I think on the forecast of artificial intelligence, I do differ with him. I think there's very little doubt in my mind that we're going to succeed and all the original goals, basically making machines that can one day do everything we can unless we wipe ourselves out first by some other means. And I think it's as a physicist, simply because I believe that you and I are quirk blob. I hope you don't get offended by this.

I've been called worse. I think the reason you are so smart has nothing to do with the fact that the particular quirks you have are arranged into carbon atoms. I think people who say that are carbon chauvinists and a little bit too limited. I think intelligence is all about information processing. And it doesn't matter whether the information is processed by carbon atoms in neurons and brains. or by some other kind of atoms in machines we build ultimately. There's no law of physics saying that we are the smartest kind of quirk blobs that can possibly exist.

So the bigger question is, to me, is not whether it's possible to blow away human intelligence with machines, but just whether we will be smart enough to figure out how to do it. And, hey, we just have the Neurip's conference, which is sort of like the, the AI rock concert of the year, which keeps growing exponentially in size. And it's just quite mind-boggling how fast this field is progressing. I'm not, you know, just a few years ago, robots couldn't walk properly. Now, today we have a viral video of robots dancing in the new year at Boston dynamics. Not long ago, you know, we didn't have self-driving cars.

Now we have self-landing rockets thanks to Elon. and not long ago, we didn't have machines that could even beat us at the Asian board game of Go. And now just the other week, Google DeepMind came out with the latest, the Mu Zero, which not only crushes us, Go and chess, and Japanese chess shogi, but also in all the Atari games from the old times, pretty much, without even being told the rules. So things are happening fast. And I think it's a juggernaut that is pretty much unstoppable unless some other disaster strikes because there's just so much money to be made in this. So many smart people are going into it. And the question isn't to me whether we're going to ultimately have superhuman AI,

but just whether it's going to be the best thing ever to happen to humanity or the worst. So when I look at when I think of the future, as you are consumed with and for good reason. We have kids, but even if we didn't have kids, we'd be concerned about the future. And I want to think back in a thought experiment to this finger puppet guy now. This is Galileo, who I consider, you know, the grandest hero of all time, and at least in science. But of course, he was in a deeply flawed individual. He had biases. He wanted to confirm the Copernican hypothesis at all costs. I'm rereading the dialogue. I never read it in full, but it's one of the most masterful books ever written in popular science and paved the way for you to pave the way for me to become a writer of popular

science works. But Galileo, I was thinking, you know, he would say things, you know, kind of about the human intellect, such as, you know, anyone who thinks he understands one thing is a fool if he thinks that means he understands everything. And I wonder, you know, the more that we think we understand AI, is that lolling us either into a Cassandra, you know, fear that the sky is going to fall and we're all going to be doomed unless you listen to people that are warning about us, or conversely, are we being too passive and neglecting the implications that could be terminal for the human species? I think it's the latter, and I love the call for humility you're making here.

I mean, being humble is, I think, at the very heart of what science is all about. you know, Galileo and others succeeded exactly because they acknowledged that we did not understand things that everybody else thought they already understood, like how objects move, right? Aristotle had said this dumb thing, you know, over a thousand years earlier that things move up with constant speed until they realize they should be going down with constant speed. And it was exactly admitting that we didn't understand that made people look more closely and get the real truth. With AI, of course, the fact of the matter is we have very, we understand too little about how it works. Most accidents that happen today with AI happen because people have a shiny black box that contain some neural network or whatever they trained and they put it in charge of something that actually affects human lives without understanding it well enough.

We've seen even very simple examples of like Boeing, which they had understood the 737 Max automated system better. before they deployed it, right? Knight Capital wished they understood their AI trading system better before they lost $10 million a minute with it on Wall Street for 44 minutes straight until someone was like, damn it, turn this thing up. So I actually, this is what we work on in my MIT AI research group,

intelligible intelligence. It's exactly this humble attitude that, hey, we don't understand these systems well enough. Let's see if we can open up the black box and make AI systems that are as good, but that we can understand better. So we have some reason to trust them. And I also think you alluded to the future of humanity, right? We clearly don't understand well enough what impact this is going to have on society. People, I think, today are mostly worried about the wrong things because we've seen silly Hollywood movies like The Terminator and are worried about robots coming to kill us.

What we should primarily be worried about now is robots coming to hack us. I mean, why is our world so polarized today into filter bubbles? Because AI, you know, because companies who just had a pretty legitimate goal to make money, they deployed on a massive scale algorithms to make you spend as much time as possible looking at ads. And they had not understood what this was. was going to do to society. They had not understood, and I even have a lot of friends at Facebook, who weren't charged of some of us and didn't understand it, that what would happen was these algorithms would

discover really good ways of hacking our minds, you know, showing us things that really triggered us. And if they were true, that was a bit limiting. It would be more easy to trigger people if you showed people things that were not true. and in general showed people things that confirmed or sort of brought out the worst in us. And here we are now. And suddenly really challenged democracy because of AI hacking us. And that's just, I think, a good wake-up call for us to realize that there are probably many other unintended consequences that can happen as well.

So humility is good. Let's start by the thing. We don't understand the systems that well and we don't understand what they're going to do to us. So let's try to win this race, I think, between the growing power of this tech, you know, and the understanding and wisdom we have about it so that we can steer it in a good direction. My friend, Jan Tallinn, who many who listened to this may know as the founder, one of the creators of Skype, he has this lovely metaphor about rockets. If you're going to do good things with rocketry, it's not enough to just make the engines really powerful. You also have to figure out how to steer the rocket. And you also have to think through where you wanted to go.

That shouldn't be an afterthought after launch, right? And I feel we're going to need that mistake a little bit now with AI. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. You know, I always say, you know, intelligence is knowing that you can skydive, you know, and knowing that you can actually skydive twice without a parachute. You just can't do it alive the second time. So, but I wanted to stick one more time for one more second to Galileo because in his hand he's holding a telescope, which you and I know he did not invent. Somebody else invented the telescope. Hans Lipper Shea in the Netherlands is rumored to have invented it. But he did something with it that no one had ever done before and that he looked like this with it at night. And he saw these objects that were called planets and moving in different ways. But I wonder, you know, if he had been born a hundred years earlier, would he still have had this impact on humanity, as the father of experimental, what's at the

sake, father of observational astronomy? I don't think anyone can argue with that with a telescope. I wonder, are there people now that are born, you know, were you born too early to take use, to make use of what AI could do for good? And conversely, are there wars, let's say, let's say AI could be used to actually avert disaster through better processing news, etc. Imagine in 1916 if before Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated and that led to this catastrophe, which ultimately killed 100 million people plus around the world. Imagine if there was some like news aggregated.

Actually, it's not that important. Here's what you should pay attention to. Talk to us about what you're trying to unleash now and a force for good to give a tool to someone who might be able to wage peace, not war, using AI, to augment what humans can do. That's a wonderful question there. I think it's important to remember that artificial intelligence is not evil, and it's also not morally good. It's just a tool like all technology is. Fire is the same way. Fire is good for warming your house up in the winter, especially here in the Boston area. But you can...

also use it, the burn down your neighbor's house. So that's exactly where I was going with that rocket metaphor, right? The key thing is what you use it for. And I think what you mentioned there is that it's so important, not just how well-meaning people are and how talented they are and how motivated they are, but also what information they have access to makes a huge, huge difference. And right now, if you look at how AI is used in terms of information, you know, information flow, I would say that it's mainly used by very powerful entities to manipulate people

into watching more ads. And sometimes it's also used by governments and other powerful entities to make people vote a certain way or think a certain way. It's more used by empowering the big guys against the little guys. But that's not something inherent in technology, right? If you take a very powerful technology that's very expensive, like a nuclear weapon, it will always be more of something that big powers have a monopoly on because they're expensive and fortunately also hard to get.

But AI is not like that. It's incredibly cheap, you know. Everyone has computers and phones, and it's just once you have the code, you can share it. So there is really no fundamental reason a priori that it has to be mainly helping to dominate the little guy as opposed to empowering the little guy and this gets me really on fire I think one of the most

promising paths to a good future is to use these same technologies to empower people to make our democracy work better to enable the little guy to see through ruses and manipulation and so on and you know right now

take fact checking for instance which has become all the rage, right? It's mainly the big guys like Facebook that are fact-checking the little guys and saying, Brian, your tweet is violating community guidelines or it's wrong or whatever. But what if you, Brian, could fact-check CNN or Fox News with AI?

You have basically no power as an individual today if you see something that's wrong or misleading. to have any major feedback on them. But look at another example, and I'll give you some hope here, look at Amazon, right? If you buy something from Amazon, and it just doesn't work, and it explodes when you start using it, you're going to give it a one-star rating. And a lot of other people are too, and now suddenly that empowered the little guy, and the vendor that made this is going to really hurt and put a lot of effort into making the product better.

And I would like to see the news landscape become more like that as well, where people who try to manipulate us too much actually pay a strong reputational price. So basically, rewind now to March, right? Lockdown, MIT, kick me out of my office. I need to do something to stay sane here. So this was my big COVID project. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV! Then I heard a voice.

Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows and they were all free. The truth is out. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep,

and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. I recruited an awesome team of MIT students and been working very hard all year on this, especially on nights and weekends. To use machine learning to study news bias, part of it is a research project and we can talk more about some of the pretty hilarious findings we have like, for example, how you can see with machine learning that many newspapers put deliberately ugly photos of politicians they don't like. And it's done about equally, actually, on the left and the right side of the spectrum. But even more importantly, we started building tools that people can use. So we made this news aggregator.

You can go to it now and improve the news.org. It's work in progress, so we would love feedback. But the idea, basically, is to help you break out of your filter bubble by making it really easy to see alternative perspectives on the same thing. you know, right now, if someone, for example, is a Democrat and has voted against Trump, but they would like to see a little bit, understand a bit better the other side, it's very hard for them because chances are if they go to look at Breitbart news, they're just going to get offended very quickly, and that'll be the end of that experiment. And vice versa, if you take a Republican and they start reading CNN.

But what if there was an easy? easy way to find actually more nuanced articles that you disagreed with. Like if you're sitting next to someone on an airplane who you realize is from the other side of the political spectrum, and that person is just really respectful and willing to answer your questions, that's interesting, right? Many people tend to blame filter bubbles on you and say, oh, it's just people are so dumb. They just want to hear what they agree with. But my colleague here at MIT Professor David Rand actually feels that this has done research showing that it's not so simple. People are interested in hearing things they disagree with as long as it's respectful. If you're writing a paper and someone comes

and says, you know, Brian, it's this really interesting stuff you're doing, but I think there's a sign error in equation five, which invalidates everything. Surely you're going to be interested to know that, right? Are you going to be pissed at the person who said that? Or if you have a company and someone points out to you that there's some fundamental that flaw, safety flaw in your product. You don't want to know that, right? And on the proof of the news, it becomes super easy to see respectful articles on the other side.

We have these sliders. You can just go slide it from left to right and see what others are saying. And if you want more nuanced, we have a nuanced slider. If you want to get offended, you can pull it up to the aggressive side. All that hominem attacks on your side. And there's also, it's not just the usual left-right, but another equally interesting access, I think, is the one that has to do with corruption. You know, because generally the powers that be tend to get kind of corrupted in various ways. And that means people, there's not so much tendency to criticize the most powerful.

So we have a slider for that. If you go to the anti-establishment slide, you'll find a lot of smaller newspapers that are happy to criticize both parties and criticize big companies. and even push back a bit on nationalism. You know, most countries will mostly have newspapers saying good things about this, their country, and why all conflicts are the other countries' fault. So if you live in America, of course, China is the bad guy. Russia is the bad guy. If you live in China, of course, it's going to be the other way around. As scientists, you know, we like to see all sides of the story. So this also makes it very easy to do that.

that's my COVID project. That's great. But I think it's so innovative, and it's exactly in keeping with your ironically named moniker Mad Max, because you're like, we're going to call this episode the way of the happy cosmologist. And I'd be remiss we have about 15 minutes to go right now, but I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you at least one question about my favorite subject, which is cosmology, which is how we met. And that has...

Before we go cosmic, though, can I just add one more thing? about this? Sure. Of course. It's your show. Yeah. You know, some of my friends, I think, are too pessimistic and say, we're screwed. It's impossible to have a media landscape where you can easily find the truth, you know.

But, hey, we know an example of a field where there's been tons of controversy where we actually have a really good media landscape. Science. Yes. Look at physics. You mentioned Galileo, right? So suppose he had put out his paper, or rather given a speech or whatever, and said, hey, you know, I think Earth is going around the sun.

And now the 1600s Facebook says fact-checked by the Pope. No. Poles fact-checkers says it's the sun going around the earth. Fortunately, the science media system works a lot better than that, right? In fact, you've probably never had an issue trying to figure out whether some theorem is true or false because different people are politicizing the proof or whether, you know, whether some other star system discovered was really there or not. We have a really good system.

And I think it's, so this is my basic vision. How can we take the things that really work in the scientific search for truth that have made our way of finding the truth and writing about it in the media system so effective and take the best parts there and apply it to the mass media? without it being as boring to read as scientific papers. And I think we actually, and when I say we, I mean, of course, a lot of scientists are dead now who helped build this up, have developed some really good tools that the rest of the society can benefit from.

Wouldn't it be amazing if people had as easy a time finding out correct facts about controversial political issues as you have, you know, if you want to know the mass of the electron. Yeah, I think the issue, I think if I were to beta test it or whatever before it was sprung out, I would see like, what can we do for the public to increase trust in scientists? Because as you're saying, we have an obligation because the community of the world trusts us so much and last finger puppet for now. But Carl Sagan said, you know, we live in a dangerous age because we have this incredible technology and we have, you know, I always say we have a Sorry, let me pause.

We'll edit this part out. But Carl Sagan said, we live in an age where never have we had so much technology with so little comprehension of what the technology is based upon. I had Barry Barish on the podcast a couple of months ago. And he said, basically, we stifle curiosity, but then we basically turn over this weapon of mass destruction potentially in the form of social media to people that have no idea even how a television works. So this brings up my point, my kind of hobby horse.

when it comes to this is, I guess I'm less interested, you know, you know science, the word science means knowledge. It doesn't mean wisdom. And I'm kind of curious, do you think we could have artificial wisdom, not just artificial intelligence? I think, I think we already do, but could we have artificial wisdom? In other words, the experience, the know-how, the benefits of hindsight to apply it in a way that it is most efficacious and also most beneficial, always striving towards that TLAological metric. It's so brilliantly connected back now with this wisdom race that I was talking about earlier, right? The Sagan quote is exactly about what happens when you lose the wisdom race, when your technology

power grows faster than the wisdom with which we manage it. And I think trying to improve the media system and how we get information is really core, actually, for help for the wisdom development. Because, for example, one aspect of wisdom is, how should we live our lives ourselves personally? What decisions should we make to flourish? Another one is how should we organize our society and make decisions so that we all flourish, you know, collectively. This is an experimental science, just like the physics you do, right? There are many different places where people have tried different things.

Different people have tried different life strategies, different countries, different regions, different cities have. If you can have a really good system of communicating about this and seeing what works, what doesn't work, then the wisdom can be copied. The things that do work will be copied and will all be just so much better off for it. Get your reaction to, I've had a lot of conversations with folks like Peter Diamandes, who's an MIT trained graduate. And he, of course, is very interested in these things that he says grow exponentially. And in his book, which just came out with Stephen Kotler, who's going to be on the show as well,

who's got a new book out about things that are impossible, which is appropriate for the Into the Impossible podcast. They both talk about these abundant, bold, all these things are exponentials. And I make the point every year, so today is New Year's Eve 2020, and you'll be listening to this out there in January or so of 2021. But every year I make the same New Year's resolution. I want to drop five pounds. I did it this year, Max. I dropped five pounds from my double chin to my stomach. So it didn't go

very far. But I dropped it. Okay. But no, seriously. So I always say, well, what if I lost those five pounds over the course by just doing one percent per day? But it was exponential. So it would compound. So the first day I'd lose one percent of the weight of the five pounds. And it keep going. It turns out, as you know, that you don't lose 365 percent or you don't have, you know, exponential gains don't work that way. You actually, at the end of the year, if you improve or lose weight at a rate of 1% per day compounded, as Einstein called it, I lied when I said that was the last puppet. Here's a puppet. One more puppet for you, Max, that it's the greatest invention of the human mind is compound intrus. So, but they sneak up on you. The hockey stick is real, but it occurs

very late. You'll actually only lose about like maybe four ounces between now and 72 days from now, which is the doubling period at 1% per day, roughly. So in other words, if I lose five pounds in a year, the first 72 days I'll only lose four ounces, which I could undo by drinking this delicious jaco go. Not a sponsor of the podcast yet. I wish. But anyway, what is it about the human mind's inability

to perceive and detect these exponentially growing things like AI? Well, I think by and large we're very bad at detecting these exponential things, which is of course why we have things sneak up on us. If you were looking at an antelope running across the horizon, it would not exponentially speed up. So we did these linear interpolations, so we knew where to run and catch it and eat it and stuff like that. I think more broadly, I think,

we have, unfortunately, a lot of challenges where our mind evolved to really work well in the environment we lived in tens of thousands of years. ago and now we live in a completely different world. So I think the only hope is that we can actually use the methods of science, which don't have these inhibitions, to aid our mind. And nonetheless get things right. Even when you send rockets to Mars, you're not really just trusting your gut intuition. You actually trust the science. That's right. That's right. And as, you know, we point out, if you were off by just half a degree, you know, when you're going to the

moon, that's enough to get you off course. And so it benefits you as a pilot. I know you want to get on course as soon as possible because these things get exponentially amplified away. I have so many more things I want to talk to you about, Max. Maybe we'll come back and do a part two because I have to ask you the questions that I ask all my guests on the Into the Impossible podcast. And then we have another appointment for another podcast. So in the remaining five minutes, I would love to take you into the impossible and ask you the following three questions. The first is that your homeland namesake, or not namesake, but you're, the patron saint of Sweden, Alfred Nobel, I stole this from Barry Barish when he came to visit.

When he, when he established, one with chocolate inside, right? No comment. I will not say if this is my Hanukkah gelt left over. But Alfred Nobel, he had no children. He was not married, and yet he cared deeply about the future of humanity. And one of the things he did is he said, my prizes shall go to people only if they have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind. And he left money, but he also left that as his ethical will. I want to ask you, Max, tagmark, what sort of wisdom would you want to leave, not monetary? I know I'm going to get most of that in 150 years when you finally spring from this mortal coil. But, Max, what would you want to leave your biological but your ideological children, of which I count myself as one, as a form of inheritance.

from the wisdom of Max Tagmark, not the intelligence. I think the most important thing I've learned so far as a scientist is that we humans are just the masters of underestimation. We need to think bigger. Not only have we underestimated the size of the resources we have, we realize that everything we thought existed is just a tiny part of something grander, right? The planet, the solar system, the galaxy,

a super cluster of galaxy as a universe, you know, maybe more. But even more inspiringly, we realized that we totally underestimated our ability with our human intelligence to understand the world through science and therefore to improve the world with technology. So I think that's my big message. Never underestimate how much you can influence things. And when you start to realize how much influence, have are the very natural next step is to think okay then how can I make sure this influence

becomes good and then go on and do things there's no better way to fail than to persuade yourself that you have no influence and there's no point in even trying that's beautiful max well i've got two more questions but we're out of time for now so i will invite you back onto the into the impossible podcast if nothing else than to you know just justify you know just justify you a really good time for me in my audience. But Max, it's such a treat to go into the impossible with you. The many more things we're going to talk about. I just, I just can't say how much I've appreciated and grown from knowing you, your graciousness. I can't think of someone else who's really done so much with nothing in return. I mean, when you started mentoring me as a graduate

student, there's nothing. I can't do anything for you now. Maybe I could babysit your kid. Or, you know, if they come to UCSD, I'll take care of them, whatever. But bottom line is, you've done so much with nothing in return. I want to thank you so much for going into The Impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes.

For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Brian Keating.com. Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, D.R. Brian Keating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to imagination.ucsd.edu. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, Director, Ryan Keating, co-director,

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