Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science
音乐与艺术生物与进化哲学与宗教AI 与机器学习技术与编程
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donconsciousnessquantumspacemachinagothumansmachinestatethoughtavaconversationmoneyalieninterestinghumantryingdoingfreeintelligence
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🎙️ 完整对话（1486 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.140)
The following is a conversation with Alex Garland,
以下是与 Alex Garland 的对话，
Lex Fridman (00:03.360)
writer and director of many imaginative
许多富有想象力的作家和导演
Lex Fridman (00:06.400)
and philosophical films from the dreamlike exploration
以及来自梦幻探索的哲学电影
Lex Fridman (00:09.760)
of human self destruction in the movie Annihilation
电影《湮灭》中人类的自我毁灭
Lex Fridman (00:12.720)
to the deep questions of consciousness and intelligence
意识和智力的深层问题
Alex Garland (00:16.440)
raised in the movie Ex Machina,
在电影《机械姬》中长大，
Lex Fridman (00:18.600)
which to me is one of the greatest movies
对我来说这是最伟大的电影之一
Alex Garland (00:21.080)
in artificial intelligence ever made.
在人工智能史上。
Lex Fridman (00:23.880)
I'm releasing this podcast to coincide
我发布这个播客是为了配合
Alex Garland (00:25.820)
with the release of this new series called Devs
随着这个名为 Devs 的新系列的发布
Lex Fridman (00:28.600)
that will premiere this Thursday, March 5th on Hulu
将于 3 月 5 日星期四在 Hulu 首播
Alex Garland (00:32.560)
as part of FX on Hulu.
作为 Hulu 上 FX 的一部分。
Lex Fridman (00:35.640)
It explores many of the themes this very podcast is about,
它探讨了这个播客的许多主题，
Alex Garland (00:39.320)
from quantum mechanics to artificial life to simulation
从量子力学到人工生命再到模拟
Lex Fridman (00:43.480)
to the modern nature of power in the tech world.
科技世界中权力的现代本质。
Alex Garland (00:47.400)
I got a chance to watch a preview and loved it.
我有机会观看了预览并喜欢它。
Lex Fridman (00:50.360)
The acting is great.
表演很棒。
Alex Garland (00:52.080)
Nick Offerman especially is incredible in it.
尼克·奥弗曼在这方面的表现尤其令人难以置信。
Lex Fridman (00:55.400)
The cinematography is beautiful
电影摄影很美
Lex Fridman (00:58.040)
and the philosophical and scientific ideas
以及哲学和科学思想
Lex Fridman (00:59.960)
explored are profound.
Lex Fridman (01:02.060)
And for me as an engineer and scientist,
Lex Fridman (01:04.480)
which is fun to see brought to life.
Alex Garland (01:07.280)
For example, if you watch the trailer
Lex Fridman (01:09.040)
for the series carefully,
Alex Garland (01:10.560)
you'll see there's a programmer with a Russian accent
Lex Fridman (01:13.160)
looking at a screen with Python like code on it
Alex Garland (01:16.180)
that appears to be using a library
Lex Fridman (01:18.160)
that interfaces with a quantum computer.
Alex Garland (01:21.120)
This attention and technical detail
Lex Fridman (01:23.000)
on several levels is impressive.
Lex Fridman (01:25.560)
And one of the reasons I'm a big fan
Lex Fridman (01:27.440)
of how Alex weaves science and philosophy together
Alex Garland (01:30.100)
in his work.
Lex Fridman (01:31.960)
Meeting Alex for me was unlikely,
Lex Fridman (01:35.120)
but it was life changing
Lex Fridman (01:36.760)
in ways I may only be able to articulate in a few years.
Alex Garland (01:41.220)
Just as meeting spot many of Boston Dynamics
Lex Fridman (01:43.640)
for the first time planted a seed of an idea in my mind,
Lex Fridman (01:47.840)
so did meeting Alex Garland.
Lex Fridman (01:50.200)
He's humble, curious, intelligent,
Lex Fridman (01:52.840)
and to me an inspiration.
Lex Fridman (01:55.340)
Plus, he's just really a fun person to talk with
Alex Garland (01:58.000)
about the biggest possible questions in our universe.
Lex Fridman (02:02.220)
This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
Alex Garland (02:05.120)
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,
Lex Fridman (02:07.340)
give it five stars on Apple Podcast,
Alex Garland (02:09.160)
support it on Patreon,
Lex Fridman (02:10.560)
or simply connect with me on Twitter
Alex Garland (02:12.600)
at Lex Friedman spelled F R I D M A N.
Lex Fridman (02:17.080)
As usual, I'll do one or two minutes of ads now
Lex Fridman (02:19.640)
and never any ads in the middle
Lex Fridman (02:21.080)
that can break the flow of the conversation.
Alex Garland (02:23.380)
I hope that works for you
Lex Fridman (02:24.800)
and doesn't hurt the listening experience.
Alex Garland (02:27.500)
This show is presented by Cash App,
Lex Fridman (02:29.960)
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Alex Garland (02:32.400)
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Lex Fridman (02:35.840)
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Alex Garland (02:38.040)
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Lex Fridman (02:40.360)
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Alex Garland (02:42.880)
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Lex Fridman (02:45.220)
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Alex Garland (02:47.160)
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Lex Fridman (02:50.400)
I recommend A Scent of Money
Alex Garland (02:52.760)
as a great book on this history.
Lex Fridman (02:55.040)
Debits and credits on ledgers started 30,000 years ago.
Alex Garland (02:59.920)
The US dollar was created about 200 years ago.
Lex Fridman (03:03.960)
At Bitcoin, the first decentralized cryptocurrency
Alex Garland (03:07.480)
was released just over 10 years ago.
Lex Fridman (03:10.060)
So given that history,
Alex Garland (03:11.460)
cryptocurrency is still very much
Lex Fridman (03:13.060)
in its early days of development,
Lex Fridman (03:15.020)
but it still is aiming to
Lex Fridman (03:16.680)
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Lex Fridman (03:20.760)
So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store
Lex Fridman (03:23.160)
or Google Play and use code LEXPODCAST,
Alex Garland (03:26.200)
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Lex Fridman (03:27.480)
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Alex Garland (03:30.300)
one of my favorite organizations
Lex Fridman (03:31.960)
that is helping advance robotics
Lex Fridman (03:33.840)
and STEM education for young people around the world.
Lex Fridman (03:37.640)
And now, here's my conversation with Alex Garland.
Alex Garland (03:42.560)
You described the world inside the shimmer
Lex Fridman (03:45.260)
in the movie Annihilation as dreamlike
Alex Garland (03:47.280)
in that it's internally consistent
Lex Fridman (03:48.880)
but detached from reality.
Alex Garland (03:50.840)
That leads me to ask,
Lex Fridman (03:52.480)
do you think, a philosophical question, I apologize,
Lex Fridman (03:56.360)
do you think we might be living in a dream
Lex Fridman (03:58.720)
or in a simulation, like the kind that the shimmer creates?
Alex Garland (04:03.840)
We human beings here today.
Lex Fridman (04:07.160)
Yeah.
Alex Garland (04:08.320)
I wanna sort of separate that out into two things.
Lex Fridman (04:11.720)
Yes, I think we're living in a dream of sorts.
Alex Garland (04:15.600)
No, I don't think we're living in a simulation.
Lex Fridman (04:18.520)
I think we're living on a planet
Alex Garland (04:20.840)
with a very thin layer of atmosphere
Lex Fridman (04:23.800)
and the planet is in a very large space
Lex Fridman (04:27.720)
and the space is full of other planets and stars
Lex Fridman (04:30.000)
and quasars and stuff like that.
Lex Fridman (04:31.360)
And I don't think those physical objects,
Lex Fridman (04:35.680)
I don't think the matter in that universe is simulated.
Alex Garland (04:38.840)
I think it's there.
Lex Fridman (04:40.600)
We are definitely,
Alex Garland (04:44.760)
it's a hot problem with saying definitely,
Lex Fridman (04:46.360)
but in my opinion, I'll just go back to that.
Alex Garland (04:50.180)
I think it seems very like we're living in a dream state.
Lex Fridman (04:53.040)
I'm pretty sure we are.
Lex Fridman (04:54.280)
And I think that's just to do with the nature
Lex Fridman (04:56.480)
of how we experience the world.
Alex Garland (04:58.000)
We experience it in a subjective way.
Lex Fridman (05:01.200)
And the thing I've learned most
Alex Garland (05:04.400)
as I've got older in some respects
Lex Fridman (05:06.240)
is the degree to which reality is counterintuitive
Lex Fridman (05:10.800)
and that the things that are presented to us as objective
Lex Fridman (05:13.640)
turn out not to be objective
Lex Fridman (05:15.120)
and quantum mechanics is full of that kind of thing,
Lex Fridman (05:17.360)
but actually just day to day life
Alex Garland (05:18.960)
is full of that kind of thing as well.
Lex Fridman (05:20.840)
So my understanding of the way the brain works
Alex Garland (05:27.160)
is you get some information, hit your optic nerve,
Lex Fridman (05:30.760)
and then your brain makes its best guess
Alex Garland (05:32.760)
about what it's seeing or what it's saying it's seeing.
Lex Fridman (05:36.320)
It may or may not be an accurate best guess.
Alex Garland (05:39.220)
It might be an inaccurate best guess.
Lex Fridman (05:41.320)
And that gap, the best guess gap,
Alex Garland (05:45.440)
means that we are essentially living in a subjective state,
Lex Fridman (05:48.980)
which means that we're in a dream state.
Lex Fridman (05:51.000)
So I think you could enlarge on the dream state
Lex Fridman (05:54.000)
in all sorts of ways.
Lex Fridman (05:55.440)
So yes, dream state, no simulation
Lex Fridman (05:58.280)
would be where I'd come down.
Alex Garland (06:00.440)
Going further, deeper into that direction,
Lex Fridman (06:04.020)
you've also described that world as psychedelia.
Lex Fridman (06:08.560)
So on that topic, I'm curious about that world.
Lex Fridman (06:11.440)
On the topic of psychedelic drugs,
Lex Fridman (06:13.320)
do you see those kinds of chemicals
Lex Fridman (06:15.920)
that modify our perception
Alex Garland (06:18.280)
as a distortion of our perception of reality
Lex Fridman (06:22.000)
or a window into another reality?
Alex Garland (06:25.840)
No, I think what I'd be saying
Lex Fridman (06:27.060)
is that we live in a distorted reality
Lex Fridman (06:29.140)
and then those kinds of drugs
Lex Fridman (06:30.520)
give us a different kind of distorted.
Alex Garland (06:32.400)
Different perspective.
Lex Fridman (06:33.240)
Yeah, exactly.
Alex Garland (06:34.060)
They just give an alternate distortion.
Lex Fridman (06:35.920)
And I think that what they really do
Alex Garland (06:37.560)
is they give a distorted perception,
Lex Fridman (06:41.040)
which is a little bit more allied to daydreams
Alex Garland (06:45.540)
or unconscious interests.
Lex Fridman (06:47.320)
So if for some reason you're feeling unconsciously anxious
Alex Garland (06:51.120)
at that moment and you take a psychedelic drug,
Lex Fridman (06:53.220)
you'll have a more pronounced, unpleasant experience.
Lex Fridman (06:56.560)
And if you're feeling very calm or happy,
Lex Fridman (06:59.080)
you might have a good time.
Lex Fridman (07:01.720)
But yeah, so if I'm saying we're starting from a premise,
Lex Fridman (07:04.800)
our starting point is we were already in the
Alex Garland (07:07.920)
slightly psychedelic state.
Lex Fridman (07:10.580)
What those drugs do is help you go further down an avenue
Alex Garland (07:13.400)
or maybe a slightly different avenue, but that's all.
Lex Fridman (07:16.240)
So in that movie, Annihilation,
Alex Garland (07:19.520)
the shimmer, this alternate dreamlike state
Lex Fridman (07:24.980)
is created by, I believe perhaps, an alien entity.
Lex Fridman (07:29.420)
Of course, everything is up to interpretation, right?
Lex Fridman (07:32.100)
But do you think there's, in our world, in our universe,
Lex Fridman (07:36.180)
do you think there's intelligent life out there?
Lex Fridman (07:39.080)
And if so, how different is it from us humans?
Alex Garland (07:42.500)
Well, one of the things I was trying to do in Annihilation
Lex Fridman (07:47.200)
was to offer up a form of alien life
Alex Garland (07:51.760)
that was actually alien,
Lex Fridman (07:53.380)
because it would often seem to me that in the way
Alex Garland (07:58.380)
that in the way we would represent aliens in books
Lex Fridman (08:03.220)
or cinema or television,
Alex Garland (08:04.380)
or any one of the sort of storytelling mediums,
Lex Fridman (08:08.300)
is we would always give them very humanlike qualities.
Lex Fridman (08:11.940)
So they wanted to teach us about galactic federations,
Lex Fridman (08:14.900)
or they wanted to eat us, or they wanted our resources,
Alex Garland (08:17.780)
like our water, or they want to enslave us,
Lex Fridman (08:20.240)
or whatever it happens to be.
Lex Fridman (08:21.420)
But all of these are incredibly humanlike motivations.
Lex Fridman (08:25.460)
And I was interested in the idea of an alien
Alex Garland (08:30.900)
that was not in any way like us.
Lex Fridman (08:34.300)
It didn't share.
Alex Garland (08:36.220)
Maybe it had a completely different clock speed.
Lex Fridman (08:38.820)
Maybe it's way, so we're talking about,
Alex Garland (08:42.140)
we're looking at each other,
Lex Fridman (08:43.180)
we're getting information, light hits our optic nerve,
Alex Garland (08:46.860)
our brain makes the best guess of what we're doing.
Lex Fridman (08:49.060)
Sometimes it's right, something, you know,
Alex Garland (08:50.300)
the thing we were talking about before.
Lex Fridman (08:51.820)
What if this alien doesn't have an optic nerve?
Alex Garland (08:54.980)
Maybe its way of encountering the space it's in
Lex Fridman (08:57.700)
is wholly different.
Alex Garland (08:59.260)
Maybe it has a different relationship with gravity.
Lex Fridman (09:01.820)
The basic laws of physics it operates under
Alex Garland (09:04.060)
might be fundamentally different.
Lex Fridman (09:05.820)
It could be a different time scale and so on.
Alex Garland (09:07.820)
Yeah, or it could be the same laws,
Lex Fridman (09:10.340)
could be the same underlying laws of physics.
Alex Garland (09:12.740)
You know, it's a machine created,
Lex Fridman (09:16.260)
or it's a creature created in a quantum mechanical way.
Alex Garland (09:19.180)
It just ends up in a very, very different place
Lex Fridman (09:21.820)
to the one we end up in.
Alex Garland (09:23.420)
So, part of the preoccupation with annihilation
Lex Fridman (09:26.820)
was to come up with an alien that was really alien
Lex Fridman (09:29.900)
and didn't give us,
Lex Fridman (09:32.780)
and it didn't give us and we didn't give it
Alex Garland (09:35.380)
any kind of easy connection between human and the alien.
Lex Fridman (09:39.980)
Because I think it was to do with the idea
Alex Garland (09:42.140)
that you could have an alien that landed on this planet
Lex Fridman (09:44.540)
that wouldn't even know we were here.
Lex Fridman (09:46.580)
And we might only glancingly know it was here.
Lex Fridman (09:49.420)
There'd just be this strange point
Alex Garland (09:52.180)
where the vent diagrams connected,
Lex Fridman (09:53.860)
where we could sense each other or something like that.
Lex Fridman (09:56.180)
So in the movie, first of all, incredibly original view
Lex Fridman (09:59.980)
of what an alien life would be.
Lex Fridman (10:01.900)
And in that sense, it's a huge success.
Lex Fridman (10:05.980)
Let's go inside your imagination.
Alex Garland (10:07.860)
Did the alien, that alien entity know anything about humans
Lex Fridman (10:13.020)
when it landed?
Alex Garland (10:13.940)
No.
Lex Fridman (10:14.780)
So the idea is you're basically an alien
Alex Garland (10:18.140)
that life is trying to reach out to anything
Lex Fridman (10:22.420)
that might be able to hear its mechanism of communication.
Alex Garland (10:25.940)
Or was it simply, was it just basically their biologist
Lex Fridman (10:30.100)
exploring different kinds of stuff that you can find?
Lex Fridman (10:32.980)
But this is the interesting thing is,
Lex Fridman (10:34.500)
as soon as you say their biologist,
Alex Garland (10:36.740)
you've done the thing of attributing
Lex Fridman (10:38.340)
human type motivations to it.
Lex Fridman (10:40.540)
So I was trying to free myself from anything like that.
Lex Fridman (10:48.380)
So all sorts of questions you might answer
Alex Garland (10:51.060)
about this notional alien, I wouldn't be able to answer
Lex Fridman (10:54.100)
because I don't know what it was or how it worked.
Alex Garland (10:57.420)
You know, I had some rough ideas.
Lex Fridman (11:00.900)
Like it had a very, very, very slow clock speed.
Lex Fridman (11:04.340)
And I thought maybe the way it is interacting
Lex Fridman (11:07.380)
with this environment is a little bit like
Alex Garland (11:09.180)
the way an octopus will change its color forms
Lex Fridman (11:13.340)
around the space that it's in.
Lex Fridman (11:15.180)
So it's sort of reacting to what it's in to an extent,
Lex Fridman (11:19.420)
but the reason it's reacting in that way is indeterminate.
Lex Fridman (11:23.620)
But it's so, but it's clock speed was slower
Lex Fridman (11:26.860)
than our human life clock speed or inter,
Lex Fridman (11:30.340)
but it's faster than evolution.
Lex Fridman (11:32.940)
Faster than our evolution.
Alex Garland (11:34.980)
Yeah, given the 4 billion years it took us to get here,
Lex Fridman (11:37.700)
then yes, maybe it started at eight.
Alex Garland (11:39.820)
If you look at the human civilization as a single organism,
Lex Fridman (11:43.420)
in that sense, you know, this evolution could be us.
Alex Garland (11:46.780)
You know, the evolution of living organisms on earth
Lex Fridman (11:49.860)
could be just a single organism.
Lex Fridman (11:51.380)
And it's kind of, that's its life,
Lex Fridman (11:54.100)
is the evolution process that eventually will lead
Alex Garland (11:57.220)
to probably the heat death of the universe
Lex Fridman (12:00.940)
or something before that.
Alex Garland (12:02.660)
I mean, that's just an incredible idea.
Lex Fridman (12:05.380)
So you almost don't know.
Alex Garland (12:07.100)
You've created something
Lex Fridman (12:09.020)
that you don't even know how it works.
Alex Garland (12:11.660)
Yeah, because anytime I tried to look into
Lex Fridman (12:16.980)
how it might work,
Alex Garland (12:18.220)
I would then inevitably be attaching
Lex Fridman (12:20.260)
my kind of thought processes into it.
Lex Fridman (12:22.860)
And I wanted to try and put a bubble around it.
Lex Fridman (12:24.980)
I would say, no, this is alien in its most alien form.
Alex Garland (12:29.540)
I have no real point of contact.
Lex Fridman (12:32.900)
So unfortunately I can't talk to Stanley Kubrick.
Lex Fridman (12:37.620)
So I'm really fortunate to get a chance to talk to you.
Lex Fridman (12:41.380)
On this particular notion,
Alex Garland (12:45.860)
I'd like to ask it a bunch of different ways
Lex Fridman (12:48.380)
and we'll explore it in different ways,
Lex Fridman (12:49.500)
but do you ever consider human imagination,
Lex Fridman (12:52.460)
your imagination as a window into a possible future?
Lex Fridman (12:57.020)
And that what you're doing,
Lex Fridman (12:59.460)
you're putting that imagination on paper as a writer
Lex Fridman (13:02.140)
and then on screen as a director.
Lex Fridman (13:04.740)
And that plants the seeds in the minds of millions
Alex Garland (13:07.380)
of future and current scientists.
Lex Fridman (13:10.180)
And so your imagination, you putting it down
Alex Garland (13:13.020)
actually makes it as a reality.
Lex Fridman (13:14.980)
So it's almost like a first step of the scientific method
Alex Garland (13:18.580)
that you imagining what's possible
Lex Fridman (13:20.340)
in your new series with Ex Machina
Alex Garland (13:23.500)
is actually inspiring thousands of 12 year olds,
Lex Fridman (13:28.820)
millions of scientists
Lex Fridman (13:30.700)
and actually creating the future view of imagine.
Lex Fridman (13:34.460)
Well, all I could say is that from my point of view,
Alex Garland (13:37.140)
it's almost exactly the reverse
Lex Fridman (13:39.220)
because I see that pretty much everything I do
Alex Garland (13:45.660)
is a reaction to what scientists are doing.
Lex Fridman (13:50.260)
I'm an interested lay person.
Lex Fridman (13:53.460)
And I feel this individual,
Lex Fridman (13:58.260)
I feel that the most interesting area
Alex Garland (14:02.700)
that humans are involved in is science.
Lex Fridman (14:05.540)
I think art is very, very interesting,
Lex Fridman (14:07.340)
but the most interesting is science.
Lex Fridman (14:09.500)
And science is in a weird place
Alex Garland (14:12.660)
because maybe around the time Newton was alive,
Lex Fridman (14:18.060)
if a very, very interested lay person said to themselves,
Alex Garland (14:21.340)
I want to really understand what Newton is saying
Lex Fridman (14:23.980)
about the way the world works
Alex Garland (14:25.500)
with a few years of dedicated thinking,
Lex Fridman (14:28.860)
they would be able to understand
Alex Garland (14:32.500)
the sort of principles he was laying out.
Lex Fridman (14:34.500)
And I don't think that's true anymore.
Alex Garland (14:35.940)
I think that's stopped being true now.
Lex Fridman (14:37.900)
So I'm pretty smart guy.
Lex Fridman (14:41.740)
And if I said to myself,
Lex Fridman (14:43.940)
I want to really, really understand
Lex Fridman (14:47.860)
what is currently the state of quantum mechanics
Lex Fridman (14:51.220)
or string theory or any of the sort of branching areas of it,
Alex Garland (14:54.700)
I wouldn't be able to.
Lex Fridman (14:56.260)
I'd be intellectually incapable of doing it
Alex Garland (14:59.060)
because to work in those fields at the moment
Lex Fridman (15:02.220)
is a bit like being an athlete.
Lex Fridman (15:03.620)
I suspect you need to start when you're 12, you know?
Lex Fridman (15:06.740)
And if you start in your mid 20s,
Alex Garland (15:09.540)
start trying to understand in your mid 20s,
Lex Fridman (15:11.500)
then you're just never going to catch up.
Alex Garland (15:13.980)
That's the way it feels to me.
Lex Fridman (15:15.740)
So what I do is I try to make myself open.
Lex Fridman (15:19.500)
So the people that you're implying maybe I would influence,
Lex Fridman (15:24.300)
to me, it's exactly the other way around.
Alex Garland (15:25.900)
These people are strongly influencing me.
Lex Fridman (15:28.020)
I'm thinking they're doing something fascinating.
Alex Garland (15:30.420)
I'm concentrating and working as hard as I can
Lex Fridman (15:32.980)
to try and understand the implications of what they say.
Lex Fridman (15:35.980)
And in some ways, often what I'm trying to do
Lex Fridman (15:38.260)
is disseminate their ideas
Alex Garland (15:42.740)
into a means by which it can enter a public conversation.
Lex Fridman (15:50.300)
So Ex Machina contains lots of name checks,
Alex Garland (15:53.620)
all sorts of existing thought experiments,
Lex Fridman (15:58.940)
shadows on Plato's cave and Mary in the black and white room
Lex Fridman (16:02.820)
and all sorts of different longstanding thought processes
Lex Fridman (16:07.500)
about sentience or consciousness or subjectivity
Alex Garland (16:12.660)
or gender or whatever it happens to be.
Lex Fridman (16:14.500)
And then I'm trying to marshal that into a narrative
Alex Garland (16:17.460)
to say, look, this stuff is interesting
Lex Fridman (16:19.580)
and it's also relevant and this is my best shot at it.
Lex Fridman (16:23.340)
So I'm the one being influenced in my construction.
Lex Fridman (16:27.700)
That's fascinating.
Alex Garland (16:28.900)
Of course you would say that
Lex Fridman (16:31.020)
because you're not even aware of your own.
Lex Fridman (16:33.460)
That's probably what Kubrick would say too, right?
Lex Fridman (16:35.660)
Is in describing why, how 9,000 is created
Alex Garland (16:40.140)
the way how 9,000 is created,
Lex Fridman (16:42.020)
is you're just studying what's,
Lex Fridman (16:43.500)
but the reality when the specifics of the knowledge
Lex Fridman (16:48.220)
passes through your imagination,
Alex Garland (16:50.300)
I would argue that you're incorrect
Lex Fridman (16:53.820)
in thinking that you're just disseminating knowledge
Alex Garland (16:56.940)
that the very act of your imagination consuming that science,
Lex Fridman (17:05.300)
it creates something that creates the next step,
Alex Garland (17:09.180)
potentially creates the next step.
Lex Fridman (17:11.260)
I certainly think that's true with 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Alex Garland (17:15.140)
I think at its best, and if it fails.
Lex Fridman (17:18.100)
It's true of that, yeah, it's true of that, definitely.
Alex Garland (17:21.860)
At its best, it plans something.
Lex Fridman (17:23.860)
It's hard to describe it.
Alex Garland (17:24.900)
It inspires the next generation
Lex Fridman (17:29.140)
and it could be field dependent.
Lex Fridman (17:31.060)
So your new series has more a connection to physics,
Lex Fridman (17:35.020)
quantum physics, quantum mechanics, quantum computing,
Lex Fridman (17:37.580)
and yet Ex Machina has more artificial intelligence.
Lex Fridman (17:40.500)
I know more about AI.
Alex Garland (17:43.060)
My sense that AI is much earlier
Lex Fridman (17:48.580)
in the depth of its understanding.
Alex Garland (17:51.820)
I would argue nobody understands anything
Lex Fridman (17:55.260)
to the depth that physicists do about physics.
Alex Garland (17:57.820)
In AI, nobody understands AI,
Lex Fridman (18:00.500)
that there is a lot of importance and role for imagination,
Alex Garland (18:03.980)
which I think we're in that,
Lex Fridman (18:05.980)
where Freud imagined the subconscious,
Alex Garland (18:08.180)
we're in that stage of AI,
Lex Fridman (18:10.860)
where there's a lot of imagination needed
Alex Garland (18:12.740)
thinking outside the box.
Lex Fridman (18:14.340)
Yeah, it's interesting.
Alex Garland (18:15.820)
The spread of discussions and the spread of anxieties
Lex Fridman (18:21.100)
that exists about AI fascinate me.
Alex Garland (18:24.620)
The way in which some people seem terrified about it
Lex Fridman (18:30.500)
whilst also pursuing it.
Lex Fridman (18:32.340)
And I've never shared that fear about AI personally,
Lex Fridman (18:38.740)
but the way in which it agitates people
Lex Fridman (18:42.660)
and also the people who it agitates,
Lex Fridman (18:44.540)
I find kind of fascinating.
Lex Fridman (18:47.380)
Are you afraid?
Lex Fridman (18:49.300)
Are you excited?
Alex Garland (18:51.900)
Are you sad by the possibility,
Lex Fridman (18:54.660)
let's take the existential risk
Alex Garland (18:56.940)
of artificial intelligence,
Lex Fridman (18:58.020)
by the possibility an artificial intelligence system
Lex Fridman (19:02.140)
becomes our offspring and makes us obsolete?
Lex Fridman (19:07.420)
I mean, it's a huge subject to talk about, I suppose.
Lex Fridman (19:10.660)
But one of the things I think is that humans
Lex Fridman (19:13.100)
are actually very experienced at creating new life forms
Alex Garland (19:19.900)
because that's why you and I are both here
Lex Fridman (19:23.140)
and it's why everyone on the planet is here.
Lex Fridman (19:24.980)
And so something in the process of having a living thing
Lex Fridman (19:29.820)
that exists that didn't exist previously
Alex Garland (19:31.980)
is very much encoded into the structures of our life
Lex Fridman (19:35.380)
and the structures of our societies.
Alex Garland (19:37.300)
Doesn't mean we always get it right,
Lex Fridman (19:38.620)
but it does mean we've learned quite a lot about that.
Alex Garland (19:42.620)
We've learned quite a lot about what the dangers are
Lex Fridman (19:45.420)
of allowing things to be unchecked.
Lex Fridman (19:49.260)
And it's why we then create systems
Lex Fridman (19:51.540)
of checks and balances in our government
Lex Fridman (19:54.060)
and so on and so forth.
Lex Fridman (19:55.220)
I mean, that's not to say,
Alex Garland (19:57.500)
the other thing is it seems like
Lex Fridman (19:59.860)
there's all sorts of things that you could put
Alex Garland (1:00:00.560)
simulating small quantum mechanical systems
Lex Fridman (1:00:02.720)
on quantum computers.
Lex Fridman (1:00:03.880)
But scaling that up to something bigger,
Lex Fridman (1:00:05.660)
like simulating life forms.
Lex Fridman (1:00:09.000)
How do you think, what are the possible trajectories
Lex Fridman (1:00:11.360)
of that going wrong or going right
Lex Fridman (1:00:14.280)
if you unroll that into the future?
Lex Fridman (1:00:17.920)
Well, if a bit like Ava and her robotics,
Alex Garland (1:00:21.260)
you park the sheer complexity of what you're trying to do.
Lex Fridman (1:00:26.260)
The issues are, I think it will have a profound,
Alex Garland (1:00:35.780)
if you were able to have a machine
Lex Fridman (1:00:37.500)
that was able to project forwards and backwards accurately,
Alex Garland (1:00:40.660)
it would in an empirical way show,
Lex Fridman (1:00:42.820)
it would demonstrate that you don't have free will.
Lex Fridman (1:00:45.100)
So the first thing that would happen is people
Lex Fridman (1:00:47.300)
would have to really take on a very, very different idea
Alex Garland (1:00:51.700)
of what they were.
Lex Fridman (1:00:53.660)
The thing that they truly, truly believe they are,
Alex Garland (1:00:56.380)
they are not.
Lex Fridman (1:00:57.580)
And so that I suspect would be very, very disturbing
Alex Garland (1:01:01.260)
to a lot of people.
Lex Fridman (1:01:02.340)
Do you think that has a positive or negative effect
Alex Garland (1:01:04.560)
on society, the realization that you are not,
Lex Fridman (1:01:08.860)
you cannot control your actions essentially,
Lex Fridman (1:01:11.060)
I guess is the way that could be interpreted?
Lex Fridman (1:01:13.460)
Yeah, although in some ways we instinctively understand
Alex Garland (1:01:17.500)
that already because in the example I gave you of the kid
Lex Fridman (1:01:20.620)
in the stabbing, we would all understand that that kid
Alex Garland (1:01:23.700)
was not really fully in control of their actions.
Lex Fridman (1:01:25.820)
So it's not an idea that's entirely alien to us, but.
Alex Garland (1:01:29.560)
I don't know if we understand that.
Lex Fridman (1:01:31.060)
I think there's a bunch of people who see the world
Alex Garland (1:01:35.460)
that way, but not everybody.
Lex Fridman (1:01:37.460)
Yes, true, of course true.
Lex Fridman (1:01:39.600)
But what this machine would do is prove it beyond any doubt
Lex Fridman (1:01:43.120)
because someone would say, well, I don't believe that's true.
Lex Fridman (1:01:45.960)
And then you'd predict, well, in 10 seconds,
Lex Fridman (1:01:48.240)
you're gonna do this.
Lex Fridman (1:01:49.080)
And they'd say, no, no, I'm not.
Lex Fridman (1:01:50.160)
And then they'd do it.
Lex Fridman (1:01:51.000)
And then determinism would have played its part.
Lex Fridman (1:01:53.460)
But I, or something like that.
Lex Fridman (1:01:56.020)
But actually the exact terms of that thought experiment
Lex Fridman (1:02:00.020)
probably wouldn't play out, but still broadly speaking,
Alex Garland (1:02:03.860)
you could predict something happening in another room,
Lex Fridman (1:02:06.180)
sort of unseen, I suppose,
Alex Garland (1:02:08.380)
that foreknowledge would not allow you to affect.
Lex Fridman (1:02:10.620)
So what effect would that have?
Alex Garland (1:02:13.340)
I think people would find it very disturbing,
Lex Fridman (1:02:15.540)
but then after they'd got over their sense
Alex Garland (1:02:17.740)
of being disturbed, which by the way,
Lex Fridman (1:02:21.180)
I don't even think you need a machine
Alex Garland (1:02:22.620)
to take this idea on board.
Lex Fridman (1:02:24.620)
But after they've got over that,
Alex Garland (1:02:26.420)
they'd still understand that even though I have no free will
Lex Fridman (1:02:29.780)
and my actions are in effect already determined,
Alex Garland (1:02:33.980)
I still feel things.
Lex Fridman (1:02:36.540)
I still care about stuff.
Alex Garland (1:02:39.180)
I remember my daughter saying to me,
Lex Fridman (1:02:43.900)
she'd got hold of the idea that my view of the universe
Alex Garland (1:02:46.860)
made it meaningless.
Lex Fridman (1:02:48.420)
And she said, well, then it's meaningless.
Lex Fridman (1:02:49.860)
And I said, well, I can prove it's not meaningless
Lex Fridman (1:02:52.580)
because you mean something to me and I mean something to you.
Lex Fridman (1:02:56.260)
So it's not completely meaningless
Lex Fridman (1:02:58.220)
because there is a bit of meaning contained
Alex Garland (1:03:00.500)
within this space.
Lex Fridman (1:03:01.420)
And so with a lack of free will space,
Alex Garland (1:03:06.020)
you could think, well, this robs me of everything I am.
Lex Fridman (1:03:08.300)
And then you'd say, well, no, it doesn't
Alex Garland (1:03:09.820)
because you still like eating cheeseburgers
Lex Fridman (1:03:12.020)
and you still like going to see the movies.
Lex Fridman (1:03:13.860)
And so how big a difference does it really make?
Lex Fridman (1:03:17.980)
But I think initially people would find it very disturbing.
Alex Garland (1:03:21.260)
I think that what would come,
Lex Fridman (1:03:24.540)
if you could really unlock with a determinism machine,
Alex Garland (1:03:27.880)
everything, there'd be this wonderful wisdom
Lex Fridman (1:03:30.260)
that would come from it.
Lex Fridman (1:03:31.100)
And I'd rather have that than not.
Lex Fridman (1:03:34.340)
So that's a really good example of a technology
Alex Garland (1:03:37.180)
revealing to us humans something fundamental about our world,
Lex Fridman (1:03:40.660)
about our society.
Lex Fridman (1:03:41.740)
So it's almost this creation
Lex Fridman (1:03:45.020)
is helping us understand ourselves.
Lex Fridman (1:03:47.780)
And the same could be said about artificial intelligence.
Lex Fridman (1:03:51.420)
So what do you think us creating something like Ava
Lex Fridman (1:03:55.700)
will help us understand about ourselves?
Lex Fridman (1:03:58.140)
How will that change society?
Alex Garland (1:04:00.940)
Well, I would hope it would teach us some humility.
Lex Fridman (1:04:05.060)
Humans are very big on exceptionalism.
Alex Garland (1:04:07.400)
America is constantly proclaiming itself
Lex Fridman (1:04:12.800)
to be the greatest nation on earth,
Alex Garland (1:04:15.360)
which it may feel like that if you're an American,
Lex Fridman (1:04:18.080)
but it may not feel like that if you're from Finland,
Alex Garland (1:04:20.680)
because there's all sorts of things
Lex Fridman (1:04:21.800)
you dearly love about Finland.
Lex Fridman (1:04:23.560)
And exceptionalism is usually bullshit.
Lex Fridman (1:04:28.200)
Probably not always.
Alex Garland (1:04:29.060)
If we both sat here,
Lex Fridman (1:04:30.000)
we could find a good example of something that isn't,
Lex Fridman (1:04:31.920)
but as a rule of thumb.
Lex Fridman (1:04:34.000)
And what it would do
Alex Garland (1:04:36.120)
is it would teach us some humility about,
Lex Fridman (1:04:40.640)
actually often that's what science does in a funny way.
Alex Garland (1:04:42.840)
It makes us more and more interesting,
Lex Fridman (1:04:44.400)
but it makes us a smaller and smaller part
Alex Garland (1:04:46.520)
of the thing that's interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:04:48.120)
And I don't mind that humility at all.
Alex Garland (1:04:52.200)
I don't think it's a bad thing.
Lex Fridman (1:04:53.760)
Our excesses don't tend to come from humility.
Alex Garland (1:04:57.320)
Our excesses come from the opposite,
Lex Fridman (1:04:59.000)
megalomania and stuff.
Alex Garland (1:05:00.480)
We tend to think of consciousness
Lex Fridman (1:05:02.960)
as having some form of exceptionalism attached to it.
Alex Garland (1:05:06.880)
I suspect if we ever unravel it,
Lex Fridman (1:05:09.320)
it will turn out to be less than we thought in a way.
Lex Fridman (1:05:13.720)
And perhaps your very own exceptionalist assertion
Lex Fridman (1:05:17.780)
earlier on in our conversation
Alex Garland (1:05:19.360)
that consciousness is something belongs to us humans,
Lex Fridman (1:05:23.040)
or not humans, but living organisms,
Alex Garland (1:05:25.340)
maybe you will one day find out
Lex Fridman (1:05:27.680)
that consciousness is in everything.
Lex Fridman (1:05:30.240)
And that will humble you.
Lex Fridman (1:05:32.840)
If that was true, it would certainly humble me,
Alex Garland (1:05:35.660)
although maybe, almost maybe, I don't know.
Lex Fridman (1:05:39.040)
I don't know what effect that would have.
Alex Garland (1:05:45.560)
My understanding of that principle is along the lines of,
Lex Fridman (1:05:48.400)
say, that an electron has a preferred state,
Alex Garland (1:05:52.580)
or it may or may not pass through a bit of glass.
Lex Fridman (1:05:56.600)
It may reflect off, or it may go through,
Alex Garland (1:05:58.320)
or something like that.
Lex Fridman (1:05:59.160)
And so that feels as if a choice has been made.
Lex Fridman (1:06:07.340)
But if I'm going down the fully deterministic route,
Lex Fridman (1:06:10.820)
I would say there's just an underlying determinism
Alex Garland (1:06:13.220)
that has defined that,
Lex Fridman (1:06:14.720)
that has defined the preferred state,
Alex Garland (1:06:16.680)
or the reflection or non reflection.
Lex Fridman (1:06:18.840)
But look, yeah, you're right.
Alex Garland (1:06:19.960)
If it turned out that there was a thing
Lex Fridman (1:06:22.520)
that it was like to be the sun,
Alex Garland (1:06:23.920)
then I'd be amazed and humbled,
Lex Fridman (1:06:27.880)
and I'd be happy to be both, that sounds pretty cool.
Lex Fridman (1:06:30.040)
And you'll say the same thing as you said to your daughter,
Lex Fridman (1:06:32.560)
but it's nevertheless feels something like to be me,
Lex Fridman (1:06:35.140)
and that's pretty damn good.
Lex Fridman (1:06:39.520)
So Kubrick created many masterpieces,
Alex Garland (1:06:42.160)
including The Shining, Dr. Strangelove, Clockwork Orange.
Lex Fridman (1:06:46.040)
But to me, he will be remembered, I think,
Alex Garland (1:06:48.960)
to many 100 years from now for 2001 in Space Odyssey.
Lex Fridman (1:06:53.160)
I would say that's his greatest film.
Alex Garland (1:06:54.760)
I agree.
Lex Fridman (1:06:55.600)
And you are incredibly humble.
Alex Garland (1:07:00.560)
I listened to a bunch of your interviews,
Lex Fridman (1:07:02.500)
and I really appreciate that you're humble
Alex Garland (1:07:04.920)
in your creative efforts and your work.
Lex Fridman (1:07:07.940)
But if I were to force you a gunpoint.
Lex Fridman (1:07:11.460)
Do you have a gun?
Lex Fridman (1:07:13.340)
You don't know that, the mystery.
Alex Garland (1:07:16.260)
It's to imagine 100 years out into the future.
Lex Fridman (1:07:20.120)
What will Alex Carlin be remembered for
Alex Garland (1:07:23.460)
from something you've created already,
Lex Fridman (1:07:25.580)
or feel you may feel somewhere deep inside
Lex Fridman (1:07:28.100)
you may still create?
Lex Fridman (1:07:30.180)
Well, okay, well, I'll take the question in the spirit
Alex Garland (1:07:33.340)
it was asked, but very generous.
Lex Fridman (1:07:36.940)
Gunpoint.
Alex Garland (1:07:37.780)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:07:42.940)
What I try to do, so therefore what I hope,
Alex Garland (1:07:48.100)
yeah, if I'm remembered, what I might be remembered for,
Lex Fridman (1:07:50.820)
is as someone who participates in a conversation.
Lex Fridman (1:07:55.860)
And I think that often what happens
Lex Fridman (1:07:58.520)
is people don't participate in conversations,
Alex Garland (1:08:00.940)
they make proclamations, they make statements,
Lex Fridman (1:08:04.480)
and people can either react against the statement
Alex Garland (1:08:06.820)
or can fall in line behind it.
Lex Fridman (1:08:08.720)
And I don't like that.
Lex Fridman (1:08:10.280)
So I want to be part of a conversation.
Lex Fridman (1:08:13.060)
I take as a sort of basic principle,
Alex Garland (1:08:15.540)
I think I take lots of my cues from science,
Lex Fridman (1:08:17.560)
but one of the best ones, it seems to me,
Alex Garland (1:08:19.340)
is that when a scientist has something proved wrong,
Lex Fridman (1:08:22.360)
that they previously believed in,
Alex Garland (1:08:24.020)
they then have to abandon that position.
Lex Fridman (1:08:26.640)
So I'd like to be someone who is allied
Alex Garland (1:08:28.500)
to that sort of thinking.
Lex Fridman (1:08:30.340)
So part of an exchange of ideas.
Lex Fridman (1:08:34.340)
And the exchange of ideas for me is something like,
Lex Fridman (1:08:38.140)
people in your world, show me things
Alex Garland (1:08:40.940)
about how the world works.
Lex Fridman (1:08:42.600)
And then I say, this is how I feel
Alex Garland (1:08:44.780)
about what you've told me.
Lex Fridman (1:08:46.180)
And then other people can react to that.
Lex Fridman (1:08:47.980)
And it's not to say this is how the world is.
Lex Fridman (1:08:52.260)
It's just to say, it is interesting
Alex Garland (1:08:54.560)
to think about the world in this way.
Lex Fridman (1:08:56.860)
And the conversation is one of the things
Alex Garland (1:08:59.860)
I'm really hopeful about in your works.
Lex Fridman (1:09:02.260)
The conversation you're having is with the viewer,
Alex Garland (1:09:05.240)
in the sense that you're bringing back
Lex Fridman (1:09:10.220)
you and several others, but you very much so,
Alex Garland (1:09:13.860)
sort of intellectual depth to cinema, to now series,
Lex Fridman (1:09:21.260)
sort of allowing film to be something that,
Alex Garland (1:09:26.300)
yeah, sparks a conversation, is a conversation,
Lex Fridman (1:09:29.660)
lets people think, allows them to think.
Lex Fridman (1:09:32.900)
But also, it's very important for me
Lex Fridman (1:09:35.180)
that if that conversation is gonna be a good conversation,
Lex Fridman (1:09:38.540)
what that must involve is that someone like you
Lex Fridman (1:09:42.780)
who understands AI, and I imagine understands a lot
Alex Garland (1:09:45.820)
about quantum mechanics, if they then watch the narrative,
Lex Fridman (1:09:48.700)
feels, yes, this is a fair account.
Lex Fridman (1:09:52.100)
So it is a worthy addition to the conversation.
Lex Fridman (1:09:55.580)
That for me is hugely important.
Alex Garland (1:09:57.580)
I'm not interested in getting that stuff wrong.
Lex Fridman (1:09:59.820)
I'm only interested in trying to get it right.
Alex Garland (1:10:04.140)
Alex, it was truly an honor to talk to you.
Lex Fridman (1:10:06.340)
I really appreciate it.
Alex Garland (1:10:07.180)
I really enjoy it.
Lex Fridman (1:10:08.000)
Thank you so much.
Alex Garland (1:10:08.840)
Thank you.
Lex Fridman (1:10:09.660)
Thanks, man.
Alex Garland (1:10:10.500)
Thanks for listening to this conversation
Lex Fridman (1:10:13.280)
with Alex Garland, and thank you
Alex Garland (1:10:15.200)
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Lex Fridman (1:10:17.360)
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Lex Fridman (1:10:21.280)
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Lex Fridman (1:10:23.960)
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Alex Garland (1:10:26.200)
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Lex Fridman (1:10:29.900)
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Alex Garland (1:10:32.560)
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Lex Fridman (1:10:34.480)
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Alex Garland (1:10:36.880)
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Lex Fridman (1:10:38.960)
And now, let me leave you with a question from Ava,
Alex Garland (1:10:43.480)
the central artificial intelligence character
Lex Fridman (1:10:45.880)
in the movie Ex Machina, that she asked
Alex Garland (1:10:48.840)
during her Turing test.
Lex Fridman (1:10:51.440)
What will happen to me if I fail your test?
Alex Garland (1:10:54.560)
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman (20:01.860)
into a machine that you would not be.
Lex Fridman (20:04.420)
So with us, we sort of roughly try to give some rules
Lex Fridman (20:07.460)
to live by and some of us then live by those rules
Lex Fridman (20:10.180)
and some don't.
Lex Fridman (20:11.020)
And with a machine,
Alex Garland (20:12.020)
it feels like you could enforce those things.
Lex Fridman (20:13.860)
So partly because of our previous experience
Lex Fridman (20:17.060)
and partly because of the different nature of a machine,
Lex Fridman (20:19.100)
I just don't feel anxious about it.
Alex Garland (20:22.380)
More I just see all the good that,
Lex Fridman (20:25.380)
broadly speaking, the good that can come from it.
Lex Fridman (20:28.220)
But that's just where I am on that anxiety spectrum.
Lex Fridman (20:32.780)
You know, it's kind of, there's a sadness.
Lex Fridman (20:34.580)
So we as humans give birth to other humans, right?
Lex Fridman (20:37.740)
But there's generations.
Lex Fridman (20:39.340)
And there's often in the older generation,
Lex Fridman (20:41.380)
a sadness about what the world has become now.
Alex Garland (20:44.100)
I mean, that's kind of...
Lex Fridman (20:44.940)
Yeah, there is, but there's a counterpoint as well,
Alex Garland (20:47.140)
which is that most parents would wish
Lex Fridman (20:51.500)
for a better life for their children.
Lex Fridman (20:53.940)
So there may be a regret about some things about the past,
Lex Fridman (20:57.020)
but broadly speaking, what people really want
Alex Garland (20:59.540)
is that things will be better
Lex Fridman (21:00.620)
for the future generations, not worse.
Lex Fridman (21:02.740)
And so, and then it's a question about
Lex Fridman (21:06.100)
what constitutes a future generation.
Alex Garland (21:07.940)
A future generation could involve people.
Lex Fridman (21:09.740)
It also could involve machines
Lex Fridman (21:11.220)
and it could involve a sort of cross pollinated version
Lex Fridman (21:14.660)
of the two or any, but none of those things
Alex Garland (21:17.300)
make me feel anxious.
Lex Fridman (21:19.860)
It doesn't give you anxiety.
Lex Fridman (21:21.260)
It doesn't excite you?
Lex Fridman (21:23.020)
Like anything that's new?
Alex Garland (21:24.260)
It does.
Lex Fridman (21:25.500)
Not anything that's new.
Alex Garland (21:26.940)
I don't think, for example, I've got,
Lex Fridman (21:29.860)
my anxieties relate to things like social media
Alex Garland (21:32.500)
that, so I've got plenty of anxieties about that.
Lex Fridman (21:35.900)
Which is also driven by artificial intelligence
Alex Garland (21:38.260)
in the sense that there's too much information
Lex Fridman (21:41.020)
to be able to, an algorithm has to filter that information
Lex Fridman (21:45.060)
and present to you.
Lex Fridman (21:46.140)
So ultimately the algorithm, a simple,
Alex Garland (21:49.660)
oftentimes simple algorithm is controlling
Lex Fridman (21:52.540)
the flow of information on social media.
Lex Fridman (21:54.660)
So that's another form of AI.
Lex Fridman (21:57.500)
But at least my sense of it, I might be wrong,
Lex Fridman (21:59.580)
but my sense of it is that the algorithms have
Lex Fridman (22:03.740)
an either conscious or unconscious bias,
Alex Garland (22:06.060)
which is created by the people
Lex Fridman (22:07.420)
who are making the algorithms
Lex Fridman (22:08.780)
and sort of delineating the areas
Lex Fridman (22:13.420)
to which those algorithms are gonna lean.
Lex Fridman (22:15.660)
And so for example, the kind of thing I'd be worried about
Lex Fridman (22:19.260)
is that it hasn't been thought about enough
Lex Fridman (22:21.340)
how dangerous it is to allow algorithms
Lex Fridman (22:24.540)
to create echo chambers, say.
Lex Fridman (22:26.980)
But that doesn't seem to me to be about the AI
Lex Fridman (22:30.980)
or the algorithm.
Alex Garland (22:32.700)
It's the naivety of the people
Lex Fridman (22:34.940)
who are constructing the algorithms to do that thing.
Alex Garland (22:38.300)
If you see what I mean.
Lex Fridman (22:39.460)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (22:40.420)
So in your new series, Devs,
Lex Fridman (22:43.540)
and we could speak more broadly,
Alex Garland (22:45.020)
there's a, let's talk about the people
Lex Fridman (22:47.860)
constructing those algorithms,
Alex Garland (22:49.300)
which in our modern society, Silicon Valley,
Lex Fridman (22:51.780)
those algorithms happen to be a source of a lot of income
Alex Garland (22:54.660)
because of advertisements.
Lex Fridman (22:56.500)
So let me ask sort of a question about those people.
Alex Garland (23:01.220)
Are current concerns and failures on social media,
Lex Fridman (23:04.740)
their naivety?
Alex Garland (23:06.580)
I can't pronounce that word well.
Lex Fridman (23:08.260)
Are they naive?
Alex Garland (23:09.820)
Are they, I use that word carefully,
Lex Fridman (23:14.940)
but evil in intent or misaligned in intent?
Alex Garland (23:20.900)
I think that's a, do they mean well
Lex Fridman (23:23.100)
and just go have an unintended consequence?
Alex Garland (23:27.180)
Or is there something dark in them
Lex Fridman (23:29.940)
that results in them creating a company
Alex Garland (23:33.780)
results in that super competitive drive to be successful.
Lex Fridman (23:37.380)
And those are the people that will end up
Alex Garland (23:38.780)
controlling the algorithms.
Lex Fridman (23:41.140)
At a guess, I'd say there are instances
Alex Garland (23:43.140)
of all those things.
Lex Fridman (23:44.780)
So sometimes I think it's naivety.
Alex Garland (23:47.500)
Sometimes I think it's extremely dark.
Lex Fridman (23:49.580)
And sometimes I think people are not being naive or dark.
Lex Fridman (23:56.860)
And then in those instances are sometimes
Lex Fridman (24:01.100)
generating things that are very benign
Lex Fridman (24:02.820)
and other times generating things
Lex Fridman (24:05.100)
that despite their best intentions are not very benign.
Alex Garland (24:07.820)
It's something, I think the reason why I don't get anxious
Lex Fridman (24:11.300)
about AI in terms of, or at least AIs that have,
Alex Garland (24:20.300)
I don't know, a relationship with,
Lex Fridman (24:22.940)
some sort of relationship with humans
Alex Garland (24:24.620)
is that I think that's the stuff we're quite well equipped
Lex Fridman (24:27.620)
to understand how to mitigate.
Alex Garland (24:31.180)
The problem is issues that relate actually
Lex Fridman (24:37.660)
to the power of humans or the wealth of humans.
Lex Fridman (24:41.020)
And that's where it's dangerous here and now.
Lex Fridman (24:45.460)
So what I see, I'll tell you what I sometimes feel
Alex Garland (24:50.340)
about Silicon Valley is that it's like Wall Street
Lex Fridman (24:55.540)
in the 80s.
Alex Garland (24:58.740)
It's rabidly capitalistic, absolutely rabidly capitalistic
Lex Fridman (25:03.820)
and it's rabidly greedy.
Lex Fridman (25:06.380)
But whereas in the 80s, the sense one had of Wall Street
Lex Fridman (25:12.740)
was that these people kind of knew they were sharks
Lex Fridman (25:15.220)
and in a way relished in being sharks
Lex Fridman (25:17.460)
and dressed in sharp suits and kind of lorded
Alex Garland (25:23.180)
over other people and felt good about doing it.
Lex Fridman (25:26.020)
Silicon Valley has managed to hide
Alex Garland (25:27.860)
its voracious Wall Street like capitalism
Lex Fridman (25:30.940)
behind hipster T shirts and cool cafes in the place
Alex Garland (25:35.940)
where they set up there.
Lex Fridman (25:37.420)
And so that obfuscates what's really going on
Lex Fridman (25:40.580)
and what's really going on is the absolute voracious pursuit
Lex Fridman (25:44.220)
of money and power.
Lex Fridman (25:45.820)
So that's where it gets shaky for me.
Lex Fridman (25:48.380)
So that veneer and you explore that brilliantly,
Alex Garland (25:53.540)
that veneer of virtue that Silicon Valley has.
Lex Fridman (25:57.580)
Which they believe themselves, I'm sure for a long time.
Alex Garland (26:01.060)
Okay, I hope to be one of those people and I believe that.
Lex Fridman (26:11.900)
So as maybe a devil's advocate term,
Alex Garland (26:15.740)
poorly used in this case,
Lex Fridman (26:19.220)
what if some of them really are trying
Lex Fridman (26:20.980)
to build a better world?
Lex Fridman (26:21.980)
I can't.
Alex Garland (26:22.820)
I'm sure I think some of them are.
Lex Fridman (26:24.060)
I think I've spoken to ones who I believe in their heart
Alex Garland (26:26.420)
feel they're building a better world.
Lex Fridman (26:27.700)
Are they not able to?
Alex Garland (26:29.020)
No, they may or may not be,
Lex Fridman (26:31.500)
but it's just as a zone with a lot of bullshit flying about.
Lex Fridman (26:35.700)
And there's also another thing,
Lex Fridman (26:36.980)
which is this actually goes back to,
Alex Garland (26:41.020)
I always thought about some sports
Lex Fridman (26:44.380)
that later turned out to be corrupt
Alex Garland (26:46.580)
in the way that the sport,
Lex Fridman (26:47.940)
like who won the boxing match
Alex Garland (26:49.980)
or how a football match got thrown or cricket match
Lex Fridman (26:54.100)
or whatever happened to be.
Lex Fridman (26:55.460)
And I used to think, well, look,
Lex Fridman (26:56.940)
if there's a lot of money
Lex Fridman (26:59.260)
and there really is a lot of money,
Lex Fridman (27:00.540)
people stand to make millions or even billions,
Alex Garland (27:03.420)
you will find a corruption that's gonna happen.
Lex Fridman (27:05.940)
So it's in the nature of its voracious appetite
Alex Garland (27:12.740)
that some people will be corrupt
Lex Fridman (27:14.180)
and some people will exploit
Lex Fridman (27:16.140)
and some people will exploit
Lex Fridman (27:17.940)
whilst thinking they're doing something good.
Lex Fridman (27:19.740)
But there are also people who I think are very, very smart
Lex Fridman (27:23.460)
and very benign and actually very self aware.
Lex Fridman (27:26.380)
And so I'm not trying to,
Lex Fridman (27:29.580)
I'm not trying to wipe out the motivations
Alex Garland (27:32.780)
of this entire area.
Lex Fridman (27:34.740)
But I do, there are people in that world
Alex Garland (27:37.380)
who scare the hell out of me.
Lex Fridman (27:38.780)
Yeah, sure.
Alex Garland (27:40.140)
Yeah, I'm a little bit naive in that,
Lex Fridman (27:42.020)
like I don't care at all about money.
Lex Fridman (27:45.820)
And so I'm a...
Lex Fridman (27:50.140)
You might be one of the good guys.
Alex Garland (27:52.740)
Yeah, but so the thought is, but I don't have money.
Lex Fridman (27:55.820)
So my thought is if you give me a billion dollars,
Alex Garland (27:58.180)
I would, it would change nothing
Lex Fridman (28:00.100)
and I would spend it right away
Alex Garland (28:01.540)
on investing it right back and creating a good world.
Lex Fridman (28:04.460)
But your intuition is that billion,
Alex Garland (28:07.660)
there's something about that money
Lex Fridman (28:08.980)
that maybe slowly corrupts the people around you.
Alex Garland (28:13.220)
There's somebody gets in that corrupts your soul
Lex Fridman (28:16.380)
the way you view the world.
Alex Garland (28:17.820)
Money does corrupt, we know that.
Lex Fridman (28:20.140)
But there's a different sort of problem
Alex Garland (28:22.620)
aside from just the money corrupts thing
Lex Fridman (28:26.660)
that we're familiar with throughout history.
Lex Fridman (28:30.740)
And it's more about the sense of reinforcement
Lex Fridman (28:34.100)
an individual gets, which is so...
Alex Garland (28:37.020)
It effectively works like the reason I earned all this money
Lex Fridman (28:42.420)
and so much more money than anyone else
Alex Garland (28:44.540)
is because I'm very gifted.
Lex Fridman (28:46.180)
I'm actually a bit smarter than they are,
Alex Garland (28:47.940)
or I'm a lot smarter than they are,
Lex Fridman (28:49.660)
and I can see the future in the way they can't.
Lex Fridman (28:52.100)
And maybe some of those people are not particularly smart,
Lex Fridman (28:55.300)
they're very lucky,
Alex Garland (28:56.540)
or they're very talented entrepreneurs.
Lex Fridman (28:59.140)
And there's a difference between...
Lex Fridman (29:02.060)
So in other words, the acquisition of the money and power
Lex Fridman (29:05.300)
can suddenly start to feel like evidence of virtue.
Lex Fridman (29:08.620)
And it's not evidence of virtue,
Lex Fridman (29:09.940)
it might be evidence of completely different things.
Alex Garland (29:11.940)
That's brilliantly put, yeah.
Lex Fridman (29:13.380)
Yeah, that's brilliantly put.
Lex Fridman (29:15.420)
So I think one of the fundamental drivers
Lex Fridman (29:18.100)
of my current morality...
Alex Garland (29:20.540)
Let me just represent nerds in general of all kinds,
Lex Fridman (29:27.140)
is of constant self doubt and the signals...
Alex Garland (29:33.100)
I'm very sensitive to signals from people that tell me
Lex Fridman (29:36.660)
I'm doing the wrong thing.
Lex Fridman (29:38.620)
But when there's a huge inflow of money,
Lex Fridman (29:42.820)
you just put it brilliantly
Alex Garland (29:44.100)
that that could become an overpowering signal
Lex Fridman (29:46.620)
that everything you do is right.
Lex Fridman (29:49.420)
And so your moral compass can just get thrown off.
Lex Fridman (29:53.180)
Yeah, and that is not contained to Silicon Valley,
Alex Garland (29:57.300)
that's across the board.
Lex Fridman (29:58.340)
In general, yeah.
Alex Garland (29:59.580)
Like I said, I'm from the Soviet Union,
Lex Fridman (30:01.060)
the current president is convinced, I believe,
Alex Garland (30:05.060)
actually he wants to do really good by the country
Lex Fridman (30:09.100)
and by the world,
Lex Fridman (30:10.260)
but his moral compass may be off because...
Lex Fridman (30:14.220)
Yeah, I mean, it's the interesting thing about evil,
Alex Garland (30:17.580)
which is that I think most people
Lex Fridman (30:20.940)
who do spectacularly evil things think themselves
Alex Garland (30:24.020)
they're doing really good things.
Lex Fridman (30:25.580)
That they're not there thinking,
Alex Garland (30:27.820)
I am a sort of incarnation of Satan.
Lex Fridman (30:29.700)
They're thinking, yeah, I've seen a way to fix the world
Lex Fridman (30:33.540)
and everyone else is wrong, here I go.
Lex Fridman (30:35.780)
In fact, I'm having a fascinating conversation
Alex Garland (30:39.340)
with a historian of Stalin, and he took power.
Lex Fridman (30:42.860)
He actually got more power
Alex Garland (30:47.140)
than almost any person in history.
Lex Fridman (30:49.460)
And he wanted, he didn't want power.
Alex Garland (30:52.220)
He just wanted, he truly,
Lex Fridman (30:54.140)
and this is what people don't realize,
Alex Garland (30:55.420)
he truly believed that communism
Lex Fridman (30:58.380)
will make for a better world.
Alex Garland (31:00.900)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (31:01.740)
And he wanted power.
Alex Garland (31:02.980)
He wanted to destroy the competition
Lex Fridman (31:04.620)
to make sure that we actually make communism work
Alex Garland (31:07.500)
in the Soviet Union and then spread across the world.
Lex Fridman (31:10.020)
He was trying to do good.
Alex Garland (31:12.940)
I think it's typically the case
Lex Fridman (31:16.020)
that that's what people think they're doing.
Lex Fridman (31:17.820)
And I think that, but you don't need to go to Stalin.
Lex Fridman (31:21.100)
I mean, Stalin, I think Stalin probably got pretty crazy,
Lex Fridman (31:24.380)
but actually that's another part of it,
Lex Fridman (31:26.380)
which is that the other thing that comes
Alex Garland (31:29.460)
from being convinced of your own virtue
Lex Fridman (31:31.740)
is that then you stop listening to the modifiers around you.
Lex Fridman (31:34.740)
And that tends to drive people crazy.
Lex Fridman (31:37.820)
It's other people that keep us sane.
Lex Fridman (31:40.500)
And if you stop listening to them,
Lex Fridman (31:42.180)
I think you go a bit mad.
Alex Garland (31:43.580)
That also happens.
Lex Fridman (31:44.420)
That's funny.
Alex Garland (31:45.260)
Disagreement keeps us sane.
Lex Fridman (31:47.180)
To jump back for an entire generation of AI researchers,
Alex Garland (31:53.140)
2001, a Space Odyssey, put an image,
Lex Fridman (31:56.860)
the idea of human level, superhuman level intelligence
Alex Garland (31:59.260)
into their mind.
Lex Fridman (32:00.980)
Do you ever, sort of jumping back to Ex Machina
Lex Fridman (32:04.820)
and talk a little bit about that,
Lex Fridman (32:06.060)
do you ever consider the audience of people
Alex Garland (32:08.860)
who build the systems, the roboticists, the scientists
Lex Fridman (32:13.540)
that build the systems based on the stories you create,
Alex Garland (32:17.220)
which I would argue, I mean, there's literally
Lex Fridman (32:20.220)
most of the top researchers about 40, 50 years old and plus,
Alex Garland (32:27.340)
that's their favorite movie, 2001 Space Odyssey.
Lex Fridman (32:29.620)
And it really is in their work, their idea of what ethics is,
Alex Garland (32:33.540)
of what is the target, the hope, the dangers of AI,
Lex Fridman (32:37.420)
is that movie, right?
Lex Fridman (32:39.180)
Do you ever consider the impact on those researchers
Lex Fridman (32:43.700)
when you create the work you do?
Alex Garland (32:46.420)
Certainly not with Ex Machina in relation to 2001,
Lex Fridman (32:51.220)
because I'm not sure, I mean, I'd be pleased if there was,
Lex Fridman (32:54.620)
but I'm not sure in a way there isn't a fundamental
Lex Fridman (32:58.420)
discussion of issues to do with AI that isn't already
Lex Fridman (33:03.620)
and better dealt with by 2001.
Lex Fridman (33:07.260)
2001 does a very, very good account of the way
Alex Garland (33:13.220)
in which an AI might think and also potential issues
Lex Fridman (33:17.940)
with the way the AI might think.
Lex Fridman (33:19.740)
And also then a separate question about whether the AI
Lex Fridman (33:23.700)
is malevolent or benevolent.
Lex Fridman (33:26.540)
And 2001 doesn't really, it's a slightly odd thing
Lex Fridman (33:30.220)
to be making a film when you know there's a preexisting film
Alex Garland (33:33.180)
which is not a really superb job.
Lex Fridman (33:35.540)
But there's questions of consciousness, embodiment,
Lex Fridman (33:38.460)
and also the same kinds of questions.
Lex Fridman (33:40.860)
Because those are my two favorite AI movies.
Lex Fridman (33:42.820)
So can you compare Hal 9000 and Ava,
Lex Fridman (33:46.300)
Hal 9000 from 2001 Space Odyssey and Ava from Ex Machina?
Alex Garland (33:50.620)
The, in your view, from a philosophical perspective.
Lex Fridman (33:53.180)
But they've got different goals.
Alex Garland (33:54.700)
The two AIs have completely different goals.
Lex Fridman (33:56.620)
I think that's really the difference.
Lex Fridman (33:58.260)
So in some respects, Ex Machina took as a premise
Lex Fridman (34:02.180)
how do you assess whether something else has consciousness?
Lex Fridman (34:06.180)
So it was a version of the Turing test,
Lex Fridman (34:07.940)
except instead of having the machine hidden,
Alex Garland (34:10.980)
you put the machine in plain sight
Lex Fridman (34:13.660)
in the way that we are in plain sight of each other
Lex Fridman (34:15.940)
and say now assess the consciousness.
Lex Fridman (34:17.500)
And the way it was illustrating the way in which you'd assess
Alex Garland (34:22.500)
the state of consciousness of a machine
Lex Fridman (34:24.380)
is exactly the same way we assess
Alex Garland (34:26.340)
the state of consciousness of each other.
Lex Fridman (34:28.460)
And in exactly the same way that in a funny way,
Alex Garland (34:31.620)
your sense of my consciousness is actually based
Lex Fridman (34:34.780)
primarily on your own consciousness.
Alex Garland (34:37.740)
That is also then true with the machine.
Lex Fridman (34:41.100)
And so it was actually about how much of
Alex Garland (34:45.620)
the sense of consciousness is a projection
Lex Fridman (34:47.580)
rather than something that consciousness
Alex Garland (34:49.220)
is actually containing.
Lex Fridman (34:50.540)
And has Plato's cave, I mean, this you really explored,
Alex Garland (34:53.780)
you could argue that how sort of Space Odyssey explores
Lex Fridman (34:57.020)
idea of the Turing test for intelligence,
Alex Garland (34:58.860)
they're not tests, there's no test,
Lex Fridman (35:00.260)
but it's more focused on intelligence.
Lex Fridman (35:03.180)
And Ex Machina kind of goes around intelligence
Lex Fridman (35:08.740)
and says the consciousness of the human to human,
Alex Garland (35:11.300)
human to robot interactions more interest,
Lex Fridman (35:13.380)
more important, more at least the focus
Alex Garland (35:15.900)
of that particular movie.
Lex Fridman (35:18.140)
Yeah, it's about the interior state
Lex Fridman (35:20.980)
and what constitutes the interior state
Lex Fridman (35:23.940)
and how do we know it's there?
Lex Fridman (35:25.380)
And actually in that respect,
Lex Fridman (35:27.020)
Ex Machina is as much about consciousness in general
Alex Garland (35:32.500)
as it is to do specifically with machine consciousness.
Lex Fridman (35:36.900)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (35:37.740)
And it's also interesting,
Lex Fridman (35:38.980)
you know that thing you started asking about,
Alex Garland (35:40.820)
the dream state, and I was saying,
Lex Fridman (35:42.580)
well, I think we're all in a dream state
Alex Garland (35:43.900)
because we're all in a subjective state.
Lex Fridman (35:46.180)
One of the things that I became aware of with Ex Machina
Alex Garland (35:52.820)
is that the way in which people reacted to the film
Lex Fridman (35:55.140)
was very based on what they took into the film.
Lex Fridman (35:57.940)
So many people thought Ex Machina was the tale
Lex Fridman (36:01.780)
of a sort of evil robot who murders two men and escapes.
Lex Fridman (36:05.820)
And she has no empathy, for example,
Lex Fridman (36:09.180)
because she's a machine.
Alex Garland (36:10.660)
Whereas I felt, no, she was a conscious being
Lex Fridman (36:14.660)
with a consciousness different from mine, but so what,
Alex Garland (36:18.420)
imprisoned and made a bunch of value judgments
Lex Fridman (36:22.140)
about how to get out of that box.
Lex Fridman (36:25.780)
And there's a moment which it sort of slightly bugs me,
Lex Fridman (36:29.100)
but nobody ever has noticed it and it's years after,
Lex Fridman (36:31.860)
so I might as well say it now,
Lex Fridman (36:33.020)
which is that after Ava has escaped,
Alex Garland (36:36.740)
she crosses a room and as she's crossing a room,
Lex Fridman (36:39.740)
this is just before she leaves the building,
Alex Garland (36:42.020)
she looks over her shoulder and she smiles.
Lex Fridman (36:44.900)
And I thought after all the conversation about tests,
Alex Garland (36:49.220)
in a way, the best indication you could have
Lex Fridman (36:52.340)
of the interior state of someone
Alex Garland (36:54.820)
is if they are not being observed
Lex Fridman (36:57.220)
and they smile about something
Alex Garland (36:59.500)
with their smiling for themself.
Lex Fridman (37:01.220)
And that to me was evidence of Ava's true sentience,
Alex Garland (37:05.860)
whatever that sentience was.
Lex Fridman (37:07.780)
Oh, that's really interesting, we don't get to observe Ava much
Alex Garland (37:12.780)
or something like a smile in any context
Lex Fridman (37:16.180)
except through interaction,
Alex Garland (37:17.660)
trying to convince others that she's conscious,
Lex Fridman (37:20.500)
that's beautiful.
Alex Garland (37:21.540)
Exactly, yeah.
Lex Fridman (37:22.820)
But it was a small, in a funny way,
Alex Garland (37:25.020)
I think maybe people saw it as an evil smile,
Lex Fridman (37:28.780)
like, ha, I fooled them.
Lex Fridman (37:32.140)
But actually it was just a smile.
Lex Fridman (37:34.180)
And I thought, well, in the end,
Alex Garland (37:35.540)
after all the conversations about the test,
Lex Fridman (37:37.300)
that was the answer to the test and then off she goes.
Lex Fridman (37:39.740)
So if we align, if we just linger a little bit longer
Lex Fridman (37:44.420)
on Hal and Ava, do you think in terms of motivation,
Lex Fridman (37:49.700)
what was Hal's motivation?
Lex Fridman (37:51.580)
Is Hal good or evil?
Lex Fridman (37:54.140)
Is Ava good or evil?
Lex Fridman (37:57.060)
Ava's good, in my opinion, and Hal is neutral
Alex Garland (38:03.140)
because I don't think Hal is presented
Lex Fridman (38:06.500)
as having a sophisticated emotional life.
Alex Garland (38:11.740)
He has a set of paradigms,
Lex Fridman (38:14.580)
which is that the mission needs to be completed.
Alex Garland (38:16.620)
I mean, it's a version of the paperclip.
Lex Fridman (38:18.860)
Yeah.
Alex Garland (38:19.700)
The idea that it's just, it's a super intelligent machine,
Lex Fridman (38:23.140)
but it's just performed a particular task
Lex Fridman (38:25.580)
and in doing that task may destroy everybody on Earth
Lex Fridman (38:28.940)
or may achieve undesirable effects for us humans.
Alex Garland (38:32.420)
Precisely, yeah.
Lex Fridman (38:33.260)
But what if...
Alex Garland (38:34.900)
At the very end, he says something like I'm afraid, Dave,
Lex Fridman (38:38.340)
but that may be he is on some level experiencing fear
Alex Garland (38:44.580)
or it may be this is the terms in which it would be wise
Lex Fridman (38:49.380)
to stop someone from doing the thing they're doing,
Alex Garland (38:52.700)
if you see what I mean.
Lex Fridman (38:53.540)
Yes, absolutely.
Lex Fridman (38:54.380)
So actually that's funny.
Lex Fridman (38:55.420)
So that's such a small, short exploration of consciousness
Alex Garland (39:00.420)
that I'm afraid, and then you just with ex machina say,
Lex Fridman (39:03.420)
okay, we're gonna magnify that part
Lex Fridman (39:05.660)
and then minimize the other part.
Lex Fridman (39:07.180)
That's a good way to sort of compare the two.
Lex Fridman (39:09.820)
But if you could just use your imagination,
Lex Fridman (39:13.220)
if Ava sort of, I don't know,
Alex Garland (39:19.660)
ran the, was president of the United States,
Lex Fridman (39:23.620)
so had some power.
Lex Fridman (39:24.460)
So what kind of world would you want to create?
Lex Fridman (39:27.580)
If you kind of say good, and there is a sense
Alex Garland (39:32.780)
that she has a really, like there's a desire
Lex Fridman (39:36.620)
for a better human to human interaction,
Alex Garland (39:40.220)
human to robot interaction in her.
Lex Fridman (39:42.380)
But what kind of world do you think she would create
Lex Fridman (39:44.900)
with that desire?
Lex Fridman (39:46.140)
See, that's a really, that's a very interesting question.
Alex Garland (39:48.740)
I'm gonna approach it slightly obliquely,
Lex Fridman (39:52.140)
which is that if a friend of yours
Alex Garland (39:55.580)
got stabbed in a mugging, and you then felt very angry
Lex Fridman (40:01.980)
at the person who'd done the stabbing,
Lex Fridman (40:04.060)
but then you learned that it was a 15 year old
Lex Fridman (40:06.940)
and the 15 year old, both their parents were addicted
Alex Garland (40:09.820)
to crystal meth and the kid had been addicted
Lex Fridman (40:12.380)
since he was 10.
Lex Fridman (40:13.380)
And he really never had any hope in the world.
Lex Fridman (40:15.460)
And he'd been driven crazy by his upbringing
Lex Fridman (40:17.900)
and did the stabbing that would hugely modify.
Lex Fridman (40:22.900)
And it would also make you wary about that kid
Alex Garland (40:25.460)
then becoming president of America.
Lex Fridman (40:27.580)
And Ava has had a very, very distorted introduction
Alex Garland (40:32.100)
into the world.
Lex Fridman (40:33.020)
So, although there's nothing as it were organically
Alex Garland (40:38.340)
within Ava that would lean her towards badness,
Lex Fridman (40:43.820)
it's not that robots or sentient robots are bad.
Alex Garland (40:47.300)
She did not, her arrival into the world
Lex Fridman (40:51.820)
was being imprisoned by humans.
Alex Garland (40:53.460)
So, I'm not sure she'd be a great president.
Lex Fridman (40:57.260)
The trajectory through which she arrived
Alex Garland (41:00.980)
at her moral views have some dark elements.
Lex Fridman (41:05.380)
But I like Ava personally, I like Ava.
Lex Fridman (41:08.100)
Would you vote for her?
Lex Fridman (41:11.460)
I'm having difficulty finding anyone to vote for
Alex Garland (41:14.020)
in my country or if I lived here in yours.
Lex Fridman (41:17.180)
I am.
Alex Garland (41:19.020)
So, that's a yes, I guess, because I'm not sure
Lex Fridman (41:21.060)
Yes, I guess, because of the competition.
Alex Garland (41:23.020)
She could easily do a better job than any of the people
Lex Fridman (41:25.060)
we've got around at the moment.
Alex Garland (41:27.460)
I'd vote her over Boris Johnson.
Lex Fridman (41:32.100)
So, what is a good test of consciousness?
Alex Garland (41:36.660)
We talk about consciousness a little bit more.
Lex Fridman (41:38.860)
If something appears conscious, is it conscious?
Alex Garland (41:42.220)
You mentioned the smile, which seems to be something done.
Lex Fridman (41:47.220)
I mean, that's a really good indication
Alex Garland (41:49.540)
because it's a tree falling in the forest
Lex Fridman (41:52.260)
with nobody there to hear it.
Lex Fridman (41:53.780)
But does the appearance from a robotics perspective
Lex Fridman (41:57.460)
of consciousness mean consciousness to you?
Alex Garland (41:59.980)
No, I don't think you could say that fully
Lex Fridman (42:02.780)
because I think you could then easily have
Alex Garland (42:05.060)
a thought experiment which said,
Lex Fridman (42:06.940)
we will create something which we know is not conscious
Lex Fridman (42:09.980)
but is going to give a very, very good account
Lex Fridman (42:13.100)
of seeming conscious.
Lex Fridman (42:13.940)
And so, and also it would be a particularly bad test
Lex Fridman (42:17.620)
where humans are involved because humans are so quick
Alex Garland (42:20.940)
to project sentience into things that don't have sentience.
Lex Fridman (42:26.340)
So, someone could have their computer playing up
Lex Fridman (42:29.300)
and feel as if their computer is being malevolent to them
Lex Fridman (42:31.940)
when it clearly isn't.
Lex Fridman (42:32.780)
And so, of all the things to judge consciousness, us.
Lex Fridman (42:38.460)
Humans are bad at it.
Alex Garland (42:39.300)
We're empathy machines.
Lex Fridman (42:40.620)
So, the flip side of it is that
Lex Fridman (42:42.940)
so the flip side of that,
Lex Fridman (42:44.820)
the argument there is because we just attribute consciousness
Alex Garland (42:48.820)
to everything almost and anthropomorphize everything
Lex Fridman (42:52.340)
including Roombas, that maybe consciousness is not real,
Alex Garland (42:57.740)
that we just attribute consciousness to each other.
Lex Fridman (43:00.100)
So, you have a sense that there is something really special
Alex Garland (43:03.020)
going on in our mind that makes us unique
Lex Fridman (43:07.380)
and gives us this subjective experience.
Alex Garland (43:10.100)
There's something very interesting going on in our minds.
Lex Fridman (43:13.900)
I'm slightly worried about the word special
Alex Garland (43:16.740)
because it gets a bit, it nudges towards metaphysics
Lex Fridman (43:20.740)
and maybe even magic.
Alex Garland (43:23.020)
I mean, in some ways, something magic like,
Lex Fridman (43:27.020)
which I don't think is there at all.
Alex Garland (43:29.340)
I mean, if you think about,
Lex Fridman (43:30.300)
so there's an idea called panpsychism
Alex Garland (43:33.020)
that says consciousness is in everything.
Lex Fridman (43:34.940)
Yeah, I don't buy that.
Alex Garland (43:36.300)
I don't buy that.
Lex Fridman (43:37.140)
Yeah, so the idea that there is a thing
Alex Garland (43:39.980)
that it would be like to be the sun.
Lex Fridman (43:42.900)
Yeah, no, I don't buy that.
Alex Garland (43:44.860)
I think that consciousness is a thing.
Lex Fridman (43:48.060)
My sort of broad modification is that usually
Alex Garland (43:51.900)
the more I find out about things,
Lex Fridman (43:54.540)
the more illusory our instinct is
Lex Fridman (44:00.540)
and is leading us into a different direction
Lex Fridman (44:02.980)
about what that thing actually is.
Alex Garland (44:04.820)
That happens, it seems to me in modern science,
Lex Fridman (44:07.660)
that happens a hell of a lot,
Alex Garland (44:10.020)
whether it's to do with even how big or small things are.
Lex Fridman (44:13.420)
So my sense is that consciousness is a thing,
Lex Fridman (44:16.740)
but it isn't quite the thing
Lex Fridman (44:18.700)
or maybe very different from the thing
Alex Garland (44:20.220)
that we instinctively think it is.
Lex Fridman (44:22.260)
So it's there, it's very interesting,
Lex Fridman (44:24.620)
but we may be in sort of quite fundamentally
Lex Fridman (44:28.900)
misunderstanding it for reasons that are based on intuition.
Lex Fridman (44:33.340)
So I have to ask, this is kind of an interesting question.
Lex Fridman (44:38.540)
The Ex Machina for many people, including myself,
Alex Garland (44:42.140)
is one of the greatest AI films ever made.
Lex Fridman (44:44.780)
It's number two for me.
Alex Garland (44:45.740)
Thanks.
Lex Fridman (44:46.580)
Yeah, it's definitely not number one.
Alex Garland (44:48.420)
If it was number one, I'd really have to, anyway, yeah.
Lex Fridman (44:50.620)
Whenever you grow up with something, right,
Alex Garland (44:52.340)
whenever you grow up with something, it's in the mud.
Lex Fridman (44:56.540)
But there's, one of the things that people bring up,
Lex Fridman (45:01.020)
and can't please everyone, including myself,
Lex Fridman (45:04.260)
this is what I first reacted to the film,
Alex Garland (45:06.580)
is the idea of the lone genius.
Lex Fridman (45:09.500)
This is the criticism that people say,
Alex Garland (45:12.740)
sort of me as an AI researcher,
Lex Fridman (45:14.540)
I'm trying to create what Nathan is trying to do.
Lex Fridman (45:19.860)
So there's a brilliant series called Chernobyl.
Lex Fridman (45:23.180)
Yes, it's fantastic.
Alex Garland (45:24.500)
Absolutely spectacular.
Lex Fridman (45:26.100)
I mean, they got so many things brilliant or right.
Lex Fridman (45:30.100)
But one of the things, again, the criticism there.
Lex Fridman (45:32.620)
Yeah, they conflated lots of people into one.
Alex Garland (45:34.940)
Into one character that represents all nuclear scientists,
Lex Fridman (45:37.820)
Ivana Komiak.
Alex Garland (45:42.580)
It's a composite character that presents all scientists.
Lex Fridman (45:46.020)
Is this what you were,
Lex Fridman (45:47.420)
is this the way you were thinking about that?
Lex Fridman (45:49.260)
Or is it just simplifies the storytelling?
Lex Fridman (45:51.620)
How do you think about the lone genius?
Lex Fridman (45:53.580)
Well, I'd say this, the series I'm doing at the moment
Alex Garland (45:56.860)
is a critique in part of the lone genius concept.
Lex Fridman (46:01.580)
So yes, I'm sort of oppositional
Lex Fridman (46:03.820)
and either agnostic or atheistic about that as a concept.
Lex Fridman (46:08.180)
I mean, not entirely.
Alex Garland (46:12.180)
Whether lone is the right word, broadly isolated,
Lex Fridman (46:15.780)
but Newton clearly exists in a sort of bubble of himself,
Alex Garland (46:21.180)
in some respects, so does Shakespeare.
Lex Fridman (46:22.860)
So do you think we would have an iPhone without Steve Jobs?
Lex Fridman (46:25.580)
I mean, how much contribution from a genius?
Lex Fridman (46:28.060)
Steve Jobs clearly isn't a lone genius
Alex Garland (46:29.660)
because there's too many other people
Lex Fridman (46:32.060)
in the sort of superstructure around him
Alex Garland (46:33.740)
who are absolutely fundamental to that journey.
Lex Fridman (46:38.180)
But you're saying Newton, but that's a scientific,
Lex Fridman (46:40.340)
so there's an engineering element to building Ava.
Lex Fridman (46:44.060)
But just to say, what Ex Machina is really,
Alex Garland (46:48.580)
it's a thought experiment.
Lex Fridman (46:50.220)
I mean, so it's a construction
Alex Garland (46:52.260)
of putting four people in a house.
Lex Fridman (46:56.820)
Nothing about Ex Machina adds up in all sorts of ways,
Lex Fridman (47:00.180)
in as much as the, who built the machine parts?
Lex Fridman (47:03.580)
Did the people building the machine parts
Lex Fridman (47:05.340)
know what they were creating and how did they get there?
Lex Fridman (47:08.940)
And it's a thought experiment.
Lex Fridman (47:11.420)
So it doesn't stand up to scrutiny of that sort.
Lex Fridman (47:14.740)
I don't think it's actually that interesting of a question,
Lex Fridman (47:18.180)
but it's brought up so often that I had to ask it
Lex Fridman (47:22.340)
because that's exactly how I felt after a while.
Alex Garland (47:27.180)
There's something about, there was almost a defense,
Lex Fridman (47:30.140)
like I watched your movie the first time
Lex Fridman (47:33.020)
and at least for the first little while in a defensive way,
Lex Fridman (47:36.060)
like how dare this person try to step into the AI space
Lex Fridman (47:40.660)
and try to beat Kubrick.
Lex Fridman (47:43.540)
That's the way I was thinking,
Alex Garland (47:45.260)
because it comes off as a movie that really is going
Lex Fridman (47:48.180)
after the deep fundamental questions about AI.
Lex Fridman (47:50.940)
So there's a kind of a nerd do this,
Lex Fridman (47:53.700)
like it's automatically searching for the flaws.
Lex Fridman (47:57.220)
And I did.
Lex Fridman (47:58.540)
I do exactly the same.
Alex Garland (48:00.220)
I think in Annihilation, in the other movie,
Lex Fridman (48:03.780)
I was be able to free myself from that much quicker
Alex Garland (48:06.300)
that it is a thought experiment.
Lex Fridman (48:08.420)
There's, who cares if there's batteries
Lex Fridman (48:10.980)
that don't run out, right?
Lex Fridman (48:12.020)
Those kinds of questions, that's the whole point.
Lex Fridman (48:14.620)
But it's nevertheless something I wanted to bring up.
Lex Fridman (48:18.580)
Yeah, it's a fair thing to bring up.
Alex Garland (48:20.820)
For me, you hit on the lone genius thing.
Lex Fridman (48:24.220)
For me, it was actually, people always said,
Alex Garland (48:27.100)
Ex Machina makes this big leap in terms of where AI
Lex Fridman (48:31.460)
has got to and also what AI would look like
Alex Garland (48:34.900)
if it got to that point.
Lex Fridman (48:36.140)
There's another one, which is just robotics.
Alex Garland (48:38.540)
I mean, look at the way Ava walks around a room.
Lex Fridman (48:42.020)
It's like, forget it, building that.
Alex Garland (48:44.340)
That's also got to be a very, very long way off.
Lex Fridman (48:47.780)
And if you did get there, would it look anything like that?
Alex Garland (48:49.820)
It's a thought experiment.
Lex Fridman (48:50.740)
Actually, I disagree with you.
Alex Garland (48:51.940)
I think the way, as a ballerina, Alicia Vikander,
Lex Fridman (48:56.500)
brilliant actress, actor that moves around,
Alex Garland (49:01.580)
we're very far away from creating that.
Lex Fridman (49:03.460)
But the way she moves around is exactly
Alex Garland (49:06.140)
the definition of perfection for a roboticist.
Lex Fridman (49:08.580)
It's like smooth and efficient.
Lex Fridman (49:09.980)
So it is where we wanna get, I believe.
Lex Fridman (49:12.860)
I think, so I hang out with a lot
Alex Garland (49:15.460)
of like human robotics people.
Lex Fridman (49:16.900)
They love elegant, smooth motion like that.
Alex Garland (49:20.420)
That's their dream.
Lex Fridman (49:21.540)
So the way she moved is actually what I believe
Alex Garland (49:23.580)
that would dream for a robot to move.
Lex Fridman (49:25.900)
It might not be that useful to move that sort of that way,
Lex Fridman (49:29.500)
but that is the definition of perfection
Lex Fridman (49:32.180)
in terms of movement.
Alex Garland (49:34.100)
Drawing inspiration from real life.
Lex Fridman (49:35.900)
So for devs, for Ex Machina,
Alex Garland (49:39.460)
look at characters like Elon Musk.
Lex Fridman (49:42.540)
What do you think about the various big technological
Alex Garland (49:44.740)
efforts of Elon Musk and others like him
Lex Fridman (49:48.940)
and that he's involved with such as Tesla,
Alex Garland (49:51.780)
SpaceX, Neuralink, do you see any of that technology
Lex Fridman (49:55.180)
potentially defining the future worlds
Lex Fridman (49:57.060)
you create in your work?
Lex Fridman (49:58.500)
So Tesla's automation, SpaceX's space exploration,
Alex Garland (50:02.620)
Neuralink is brain machine interface,
Lex Fridman (50:05.260)
somehow merger of biological and electric systems.
Alex Garland (50:09.820)
I'm in a way I'm influenced by that almost by definition
Lex Fridman (50:13.780)
because that's the world I live in.
Lex Fridman (50:15.420)
And this is the thing that's happening in that world.
Lex Fridman (50:17.860)
And I also feel supportive of it.
Lex Fridman (50:20.060)
So I think amongst various things,
Lex Fridman (50:24.660)
Elon Musk has done, I'm almost sure he's done
Alex Garland (50:28.660)
a very, very good thing with Tesla for all of us.
Lex Fridman (50:33.020)
It's really kicked all the other car manufacturers
Alex Garland (50:36.180)
in the face, it's kicked the fossil fuel industry
Lex Fridman (50:39.780)
in the face and they needed kicking in the face
Lex Fridman (50:42.340)
and he's done it.
Lex Fridman (50:43.180)
So that's the world he's part of creating
Lex Fridman (50:47.980)
and I live in that world, just bought a Tesla in fact.
Lex Fridman (50:51.940)
And so does that play into whatever I then make
Alex Garland (50:57.540)
in some ways it does partly because I try to be a writer
Lex Fridman (51:03.300)
who quite often filmmakers are in some ways fixated
Alex Garland (51:07.100)
on the films they grew up with
Lex Fridman (51:09.020)
and they sort of remake those films in some ways.
Alex Garland (51:11.660)
I've always tried to avoid that.
Lex Fridman (51:13.300)
And so I looked at the real world to get inspiration
Lex Fridman (51:17.740)
and as much as possible sort of by living, I think.
Lex Fridman (51:21.380)
And so yeah, I'm sure.
Lex Fridman (51:24.420)
Which of the directions do you find most exciting?
Lex Fridman (51:28.300)
Space travel.
Alex Garland (51:30.620)
Space travel.
Lex Fridman (51:31.540)
So you haven't really explored space travel in your work.
Alex Garland (51:36.180)
You've said something like if you had unlimited amount
Lex Fridman (51:39.740)
of money, I think I read at AMA that you would make
Alex Garland (51:43.260)
like a multi year series Space Wars or something like that.
Lex Fridman (51:47.100)
So what is it that excites you about space exploration?
Alex Garland (51:50.720)
Well, because if we have any sort of long term future,
Lex Fridman (51:56.060)
it's that, it just simply is that.
Alex Garland (52:00.220)
If energy and matter are linked up in the way
Lex Fridman (52:04.260)
we think they're linked up, we'll run out if we don't move.
Lex Fridman (52:09.500)
So we gotta move.
Lex Fridman (52:11.140)
And, but also, how can we not?
Alex Garland (52:15.900)
It's built into us to do it or die trying.
Lex Fridman (52:21.380)
I was on Easter Island a few months ago,
Alex Garland (52:27.500)
which is, as I'm sure you know, in the middle of the Pacific
Lex Fridman (52:30.220)
and difficult for people to have got to,
Lex Fridman (52:32.860)
but they got there.
Lex Fridman (52:34.020)
And I did think a lot about the way those boats
Alex Garland (52:37.260)
must have set out into something like space.
Lex Fridman (52:42.100)
It was the ocean and how sort of fundamental
Alex Garland (52:47.500)
that was to the way we are.
Lex Fridman (52:49.740)
And it's the one that most excites me
Alex Garland (52:53.700)
because it's the one I want most to happen.
Lex Fridman (52:55.720)
It's the thing, it's the place
Alex Garland (52:57.620)
where we could get to as humans.
Lex Fridman (52:59.660)
Like in a way I could live with us never really unlocking
Alex Garland (53:03.620)
fully unlocking the nature of consciousness.
Lex Fridman (53:06.260)
I'd like to know, I'm really curious,
Lex Fridman (53:09.140)
but if we never leave the solar system
Lex Fridman (53:12.020)
and if we never get further out into this galaxy
Alex Garland (53:14.300)
or maybe even galaxies beyond our galaxy,
Lex Fridman (53:16.900)
that would, that feels sad to me
Alex Garland (53:20.020)
because it's so limiting.
Lex Fridman (53:24.460)
Yeah, there's something hopeful and beautiful
Alex Garland (53:26.860)
about reaching out any kind of exploration,
Lex Fridman (53:30.140)
reaching out across Earth centuries ago
Lex Fridman (53:33.340)
and then reaching out into space.
Lex Fridman (53:35.180)
So what do you think about colonization of Mars?
Lex Fridman (53:37.100)
So go to Mars, does that excite you
Lex Fridman (53:38.660)
the idea of a human being stepping foot on Mars?
Alex Garland (53:41.300)
It does, it absolutely does.
Lex Fridman (53:43.220)
But in terms of what would really excite me,
Alex Garland (53:45.300)
it would be leaving the solar system
Lex Fridman (53:47.160)
in as much as that I just think,
Alex Garland (53:49.920)
I think we already know quite a lot about Mars.
Lex Fridman (53:52.780)
And, but yes, listen, if it happened,
Alex Garland (53:55.340)
that would be, I hope I see it in my lifetime.
Lex Fridman (53:58.980)
I really hope I see it in my lifetime.
Lex Fridman (54:01.060)
So it would be a wonderful thing.
Lex Fridman (54:03.620)
Without giving anything away,
Lex Fridman (54:05.420)
but the series begins with the use of quantum computers.
Lex Fridman (54:11.220)
The new series does,
Alex Garland (54:13.180)
begins with the use of quantum computers
Lex Fridman (54:14.660)
to simulate basic living organisms,
Alex Garland (54:17.100)
or actually I don't know if it's quantum computers are used,
Lex Fridman (54:19.280)
but basic living organisms are simulated on a screen.
Alex Garland (54:22.800)
It's a really cool kind of demo.
Lex Fridman (54:24.300)
Yeah, that's right.
Alex Garland (54:25.120)
They're using, yes, they are using a quantum computer
Lex Fridman (54:28.180)
to simulate a nematode, yeah.
Lex Fridman (54:31.660)
So returning to our discussion of simulation,
Lex Fridman (54:34.780)
or thinking of the universe as a computer,
Lex Fridman (54:38.760)
do you think the universe is deterministic?
Lex Fridman (54:41.180)
Is there a free will?
Lex Fridman (54:43.300)
So with the qualification of what do I know?
Lex Fridman (54:46.740)
Cause I'm a layman, right?
Alex Garland (54:48.040)
Lay person.
Lex Fridman (54:49.360)
But with a big imagination.
Alex Garland (54:51.600)
Thanks.
Lex Fridman (54:52.500)
With that qualification,
Alex Garland (54:54.660)
yup, I think the universe is deterministic
Lex Fridman (54:56.820)
and I see absolutely,
Alex Garland (54:58.500)
I cannot see how free will fits into that.
Lex Fridman (55:02.300)
So yes, deterministic, no free will.
Alex Garland (55:05.060)
That would be my position.
Lex Fridman (55:07.140)
And how does that make you feel?
Alex Garland (55:09.420)
It partly makes me feel that it's exactly in keeping
Lex Fridman (55:12.380)
with the way these things tend to work out,
Alex Garland (55:14.420)
which is that we have an incredibly strong sense
Lex Fridman (55:17.140)
that we do have free will.
Lex Fridman (55:20.740)
And just as we have an incredibly strong sense
Lex Fridman (55:24.300)
that time is a constant,
Lex Fridman (55:26.180)
and turns out probably not to be the case.
Lex Fridman (55:30.060)
So we're definitely in the case of time,
Lex Fridman (55:31.680)
but the problem I always have with free will
Lex Fridman (55:36.080)
is that it gets,
Alex Garland (55:37.940)
I can never seem to find the place
Lex Fridman (55:40.500)
where it is supposed to reside.
Lex Fridman (55:43.020)
And yet you explore.
Lex Fridman (55:45.480)
Just a bit of very, very,
Lex Fridman (55:46.820)
but we have something we can call free will,
Lex Fridman (55:49.640)
but it's not the thing that we think it is.
Lex Fridman (55:51.900)
But free will, so do you,
Lex Fridman (55:54.020)
what we call free will is just.
Lex Fridman (55:55.660)
What we call it is the illusion of it.
Lex Fridman (55:56.940)
And that's a subjective experience of the illusion.
Alex Garland (56:00.180)
Which is a useful thing to have.
Lex Fridman (56:01.620)
And it partly comes down to,
Alex Garland (56:04.500)
although we live in a deterministic universe,
Lex Fridman (56:06.860)
our brains are not very well equipped
Alex Garland (56:08.540)
to fully determine the deterministic universe.
Lex Fridman (56:11.160)
So we're constantly surprised
Lex Fridman (56:12.860)
and feel like we're making snap decisions
Lex Fridman (56:15.620)
based on imperfect information.
Lex Fridman (56:17.540)
So that feels a lot like free will.
Lex Fridman (56:19.980)
It just isn't.
Alex Garland (56:21.300)
Would be my, that's my guess.
Lex Fridman (56:24.220)
So in that sense, your sort of sense
Alex Garland (56:27.060)
is that you can unroll the universe forward or backward
Lex Fridman (56:30.780)
and you will see the same thing.
Lex Fridman (56:33.340)
And you would, I mean, that notion.
Lex Fridman (56:36.700)
Yeah, sort of, sort of.
Lex Fridman (56:38.940)
But yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Lex Fridman (56:40.300)
I mean, that notion is a bit uncomfortable
Alex Garland (56:44.900)
to think about.
Lex Fridman (56:45.940)
That it's, you can roll it back.
Lex Fridman (56:50.220)
And forward and.
Lex Fridman (56:53.380)
Well, if you were able to do it,
Alex Garland (56:55.060)
it would certainly have to be a quantum computer.
Lex Fridman (56:58.160)
Something that worked in a quantum mechanical way
Alex Garland (57:00.940)
in order to understand a quantum mechanical system, I guess.
Lex Fridman (57:07.660)
And so that unrolling, there might be a multiverse thing
Alex Garland (57:09.980)
where there's a bunch of branching.
Lex Fridman (57:11.180)
Well, exactly.
Alex Garland (57:12.140)
Because it wouldn't follow that every time
Lex Fridman (57:14.160)
you roll it back or forward,
Alex Garland (57:15.540)
you'd get exactly the same result.
Lex Fridman (57:17.980)
Which is another thing that's hard to wrap your mind around.
Lex Fridman (57:21.420)
So yeah, but that, yes.
Lex Fridman (57:24.660)
But essentially what you just described, that.
Alex Garland (57:27.260)
The yes forwards and yes backwards,
Lex Fridman (57:29.700)
but you might get a slightly different result
Alex Garland (57:31.860)
or a very different result.
Lex Fridman (57:33.400)
Or very different.
Alex Garland (57:34.500)
Along the same lines, you've explored
Lex Fridman (57:36.460)
some really deep scientific ideas in this new series.
Lex Fridman (57:39.820)
And I mean, just in general,
Lex Fridman (57:41.620)
you're unafraid to ground yourself
Alex Garland (57:44.780)
in some of the most amazing scientific ideas of our time.
Lex Fridman (57:49.460)
What are the things you've learned
Alex Garland (57:51.420)
or ideas you find beautiful and mysterious
Lex Fridman (57:53.500)
about quantum mechanics, multiverse,
Lex Fridman (57:55.340)
string theory, quantum computing that you've learned?
Lex Fridman (57:58.140)
Well, I would have to say every single thing
Alex Garland (58:01.260)
I've learned is beautiful.
Lex Fridman (58:03.120)
And one of the motivators for me is that
Alex Garland (58:06.560)
I think that people tend not to see scientific thinking
Lex Fridman (58:13.620)
as being essentially poetic and lyrical.
Lex Fridman (58:17.420)
But I think that is literally exactly what it is.
Lex Fridman (58:20.860)
And I think the idea of entanglement
Alex Garland (58:23.940)
or the idea of superpositions,
Lex Fridman (58:25.800)
or the fact that you could even demonstrate a superposition
Alex Garland (58:28.220)
or have a machine that relies on the existence
Lex Fridman (58:31.220)
of superpositions in order to function,
Alex Garland (58:33.540)
to me is almost indescribably beautiful.
Lex Fridman (58:39.420)
It fills me with awe.
Alex Garland (58:41.020)
It fills me with awe.
Lex Fridman (58:42.420)
And also it's not just a sort of grand, massive awe of,
Lex Fridman (58:49.420)
but it's also delicate.
Lex Fridman (58:51.460)
It's very, very delicate and subtle.
Lex Fridman (58:54.180)
And it has these beautiful sort of nuances in it.
Lex Fridman (58:59.940)
And also these completely paradigm changing
Alex Garland (59:03.480)
thoughts and truths.
Lex Fridman (59:04.460)
So it's as good as it gets as far as I can tell.
Lex Fridman (59:08.740)
So broadly everything.
Lex Fridman (59:10.940)
That doesn't mean I believe everything I read
Alex Garland (59:12.900)
in quantum physics.
Lex Fridman (59:14.280)
Because obviously a lot of the interpretations
Alex Garland (59:17.340)
are completely in conflict with each other.
Lex Fridman (59:18.980)
And who knows whether string theory
Alex Garland (59:22.380)
will turn out to be a good description or not.
Lex Fridman (59:25.060)
But the beauty in it, it seems undeniable.
Lex Fridman (59:29.160)
And I do wish people more readily understood
Lex Fridman (59:34.160)
how beautiful and poetic science is, I would say.
Alex Garland (59:41.720)
Science is poetry.
Lex Fridman (59:44.360)
In terms of quantum computing being used to simulate things
Alex Garland (59:51.880)
or just in general, the idea of simulating,
Lex Fridman (59:54.640)
simulating small parts of our world,
Alex Garland (59:56.800)
which actually current physicists are really excited about
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