Joe Rogan Experience Review podcast - A Review of Episode Dr. Ben Goertzel

Episode Date: December 13, 2018

Dr. Goertzel is an artificial intelligence researcher that has been working in that field for 30 years. His take on AI and how quickly it is coming was really fascinating. Enjoy my review folks! Please email me with any suggestions and questions for future Reviews:   [e-mail]

Okay, so today's episode of the JRE review was a doozy a complicated one with a very very smart man That I could barely understand a lot of the time Luckily he was really good at dumbing it down for us his name is Ben Gertzel G-O-E-R-T-Z-E-L Joe even spells it out before he starts the podcast because it's a difficult word to say Ah a name I mean surname, Dr. Ben Gertzel, podcast 12-11. He's an AI scientist that's been studying artificial intelligence for 30 years and is pretty much the leading voice and brain in AI today. So without further ado, let's start the review. So Ben's an interesting guy to listen to.

He lives in China or Hong Kong. He moved out there because there's more money in AI research than in the US, which is a little depressing to me. I would like to think that the US is at the forefront of this, but that's okay. Maybe they're all working together or maybe the US is just going to steal all the data right before they make the actual AI's. I don't know, I'm sure America has a plan for this. But yeah, Ben talks about how he's been working in the field of AI for 30 years, which is kind of crazy to me because I think 30 years ago, computers were so shit that what the hell was AI even doing at all? Why was anyone even thinking about it? What could you do with those computers?

AI-wise. But yeah, he feels like we are like five to 30 years away from fully functional human style AI. Crazy. And he isn't afraid of AI. You wouldn't think that somebody that works in AI would be, but you know, artificial intelligence robots are seen as scary things in the US. I think and he was pointing out to Joe that he thinks it's a cultural reason. Like in movies and things like the Terminator and stuff like that, even Robocop,

like some of the robots are bad and kill the people. And he says in Asia they don't see it that way. You know, they got a lot of AI robots in anime and their cartoons and in their culture they see the robots as being very helpful. So that's kind of interesting, you know, and there's no reason to believe that robots will kill us, even if Stephen Hawkins, Sam Harris, Elon Musk think that they will. I mean, who knows, they're just going to be a lot smarter than us, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to do us any damage. But I guess we'll find out because we're building the fucking things. So it's just gonna be a lot smarter than us and that doesn't necessarily mean that they're gonna do us any damage, but

I guess we'll find out because we're building the fucking things. So One thing they were talking about is right now we're we're kind of training AIs to make us buy things which makes sense if you look at like an Alexa or Google Home they're kind of listening to us gathering data for like what we're talking about, and figuring out how best to sell us products, especially Amazon, I mean Jeff Bezos has raken it in, and I'm sure he's able to do it by just information.

They say knowledge is power, and now more than ever, that's true. I mean, you know, Google didn't just make a ton of money because it was a great search engine. It also knew everything that people was wanting to search. So it was like, what are everyone's questions? And that's fascinating. You can really start marketing the people in that direction. But is it a good thing? I don't know. It's a bit, it's a bit of a shame because they're being rewarded for manipulating us. So what does that teach these AI?

Maybe we should teach them different things, you know? He says really most technology was paid for and created by the US. It's not really private firms. It's like the governments themselves. So the military especially funds a lot of things like GPS and ballistic stuff things for NASA So

It's very important the governments are involved in these major projects and it's usually when they've been created The private firms can come in and update them and do that. So when you're looking at AI a lot of it is kind of government paid for research, which is very important. And then Ben talks a little bit to Joe about open source, fire sharing, things online, where you can share algorithms. It's all free, everyone shares it all so that you can use different algorithms and different little AI bots to run different programs and it's kind of cool it's like a very democratic like friendly free open environment for research. Another thing he talks about is something called blockchain.

I didn't know what either open source of blockchain man. I don't know shit about computers, but it was interesting to hear it. Now blockchain is something else. It's a decentralized control where people vote on updates. So if there's a program that comes out and a thousand people are using it, as long as over 50% vote to have a new update to fix something, then someone can anonymously put an update out there and things can be updated. And what uses blockchain from what they were what them was saying is things like Bitcoin. That was one of the first blockchain things.

So this like online issue. Throughout the podcast, Ben talks a lot about the singularity. And the singularity to Ben from what I was understanding is that it is the moment where things change rapidly. Where we move into the future of, in this case, for him, AI, like an AI is created, that is thinking at a rate very similar to us, and then from that point on,

it can either make itself smarter or just become so much more advanced than us, that it starts solving problems infinitely quick. And the example he gives, it's like Nobel Prize winning ideas, but pumping them out like every second. So we almost don't know what to do with it. It's a point in time when technological advancement is happening so fast, it seems almost spontaneous.

Which is crazy to think that there could ever be something like that. And it's really fascinating because you think of issues like climate change, problems there, things with the economies, the distribution of wealth, the inequalities there, the issues with the interest rates, just going up and up and up and up and the national debt and it's like wait what and I and if a Superbrain came in and was able to just run massive simulations and be like oh, yeah This is a quick way to fix this you could try this you could do this. I've Calcutte I ran this simulation a million times in every direction and this is the outcome that you get I think it's gonna save our stupid brains a lot of work to figuring out those larger issues

because it's kind of something we can't then disagree on because this computer did it and we have to assume it knows what it's talking about. Another thing they talk about is uploading your mind so that you can live forever. Ben doesn't quite believe reality as we know it. He's basically saying, excuse me, that it might not be real, that all this could be a simulation. People like playing with that idea, you know, I'm too stupid to even begin to understand what that means. But you know what he's really saying is you can't be sure. You can't be sure that all this could just stop right now. That you could just be a brain and a job being fed input. And somebody's just monitoring your behavior. You know, watching the bad things you do, the good things you do, how you react

to stuff. I don't know. He's a weird AI scientist, bless him, super smart guy, so maybe there's something to these ideas. He's a little scary in depressing though, but he really ends on an important point in his passion for doing it and why he's really into it and his message to Joe and to the audience really was, you need to make an AI to be smarter and more compassionate than us. you need to make an AI to be smarter and more compassionate than us. And really this is designed to save us from ourselves. Which I like that. I like that message of AI. And Joe says he's gonna have him on every year to get an update, to see where we are, how close we are to this singularity or an AI that works.

And I'm excited to see it. I think it's gonna be good stuff. I wouldn't mind a robot that you can hang out with. Anyway, thanks a lot for listening guys. Check out that podcast. Really interesting conversation. Super nice cool guy. Very smart. And if you're into AI stuff, you definitely want to listen to it. So thanks a lot guys. Talk soon. Bye! Thanks a lot guys, talk soon, bye.