Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity

Robin Hanson (03:02.240)

grab isn't to leave it alone the way it started, right? So we humans, when we go around the Earth

Lex Fridman (03:08.480)

and use stuff, we change it. We would turn a forest into a farmland, turn a harbor into a city.

Lex Fridman (03:14.720)

So the idea is aliens would do something with it. And so we're not exactly sure what it would look

Robin Hanson (03:20.160)

like, but it would look different. So somewhere in the sky, we would see big spheres of different

Robin Hanson (03:25.280)

activity where things had been changed because they had been there. Expanding spheres. Right.

Lex Fridman (03:30.720)

So as you expand, you aggressively interact and change the environment.

Lex Fridman (03:34.480)

So the word grabby versus loud, you're using them sometimes synonymously, sometimes not.

Robin Hanson (03:40.560)

Grabby to me is a little bit more aggressive. What does it mean to be loud? What does it mean

Robin Hanson (03:48.000)

to be grabby? What's the difference? And loud in what way? Is it visual? Is it sound? Is it some

Robin Hanson (03:53.760)

other physical phenomena like gravitational waves? Are you using this kind of in a broad

Lex Fridman (03:59.840)

philosophical sense or there's a specific thing that it means to be loud in this universe of ours?

Robin Hanson (04:07.280)

My coauthors and I put together a paper with a particular mathematical model. And so we use the

Robin Hanson (04:14.160)

term grabby aliens to describe that more particular model. And the idea is it's a

Robin Hanson (04:18.800)

more particular model of the general concept of loud. So loud would just be the general idea that

Lex Fridman (04:23.920)

they would be really obvious. So grabby is the technical term,

Robin Hanson (04:27.360)

is it in the title of the paper? It's in the body. The title is actually about loud and quiet.

Robin Hanson (04:33.040)

Right. So the idea is you want to distinguish your particular model of things from the general

Robin Hanson (04:38.000)

category of things everybody else might talk about. So that's how we distinguish.

Robin Hanson (04:41.280)

The paper title is If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare.

Robin Hanson (04:48.080)

If life on earth, God, this is such a good abstract. If life on earth had to achieve

Robin Hanson (04:52.640)

N hard steps to reach humanity's level, then the chance of this event rose as time to the nth

Robin Hanson (05:00.240)

power. So we'll talk about power, we'll talk about linear increase. So what is the technical definition

Robin Hanson (05:06.800)

of grabby? How do you envision grabbiness? And why are in contrast with humans, why aren't humans

Lex Fridman (05:17.520)

grabby? So like, where's that line? Is it well definable? What is grabbing what is not grabby?

Robin Hanson (05:23.680)

We have a mathematical model of the distribution of advanced civilizations, i.e. aliens in space

Lex Fridman (05:29.920)

and time. That model has three parameters. And we can set each one of those parameters from data.

Lex Fridman (05:37.200)

And therefore, we claim this is actually what we know about where they are in space time.

Lex Fridman (05:42.080)

So the key idea is they appear at some point in space time. And then after some short delay,

Robin Hanson (05:48.880)

they start expanding. And they expand at some speed. And the speed is one of those parameters.

Robin Hanson (05:54.480)

That's one of the three. And the other two parameters are about how they appear in time.

Robin Hanson (05:59.280)

That is they appear at random places. And they appear in time according to a power law.

Lex Fridman (06:04.880)

And that power law has two parameters. And we can fit each of those parameters to data. And so then

Robin Hanson (06:09.840)

we can say, now we know, we know the distribution of advanced civilizations in space and time. So

Robin Hanson (06:16.240)

we are right now a new civilization, and we have not yet started to expand. But plausibly,

Robin Hanson (06:21.840)

we would start to do that within say, 10 million years of the current moment. That's plenty of time.

Lex Fridman (06:27.200)

And 10 million years is a really short duration in the history of the universe. So we are at the

Robin Hanson (06:33.120)

moment, a sort of random sample of the kind of times at which an advanced civilization might

Robin Hanson (06:37.920)

appear. Because we may or may not become grabby. But if we do, we'll do it soon. And so our current

Robin Hanson (06:42.880)

date is a sample. And that gives us one of the other parameters. The second parameter is the

Robin Hanson (06:47.760)

constant in front of the power law. And that's arrived from our current date.

Lex Fridman (06:51.920)

So power law, what is the N in the power law?

Robin Hanson (06:58.400)

That's the more complicated thing to explain.

Robin Hanson (07:00.720)

Right. Advanced life appeared by going through a sequence of hard steps. So starting with very

Robin Hanson (07:08.400)

simple life, and here we are at the end of this process at pretty advanced life. And so we had

Robin Hanson (07:12.800)

to go through some intermediate steps such as sexual selection, photosynthesis, multicellular

Robin Hanson (07:19.520)

animals. And the idea is that each of those steps was hard. Evolution just took a long time searching

Robin Hanson (07:26.480)

in a big space of possibilities to find each of those steps. And the challenge was to achieve

Robin Hanson (07:32.800)

all of those steps by a deadline of when the planets would no longer host simple life. And so

Robin Hanson (07:40.080)

Earth has been really lucky compared to all the other billions of planets out there,

Lex Fridman (07:44.800)

and that we managed to achieve all these steps in the short time of the five billion years that

Robin Hanson (07:51.200)

Earth can support simple life. So not all steps, but a lot of them, because we don't know how many

Robin Hanson (07:56.560)

steps there are before you start the expansion. So these are all the steps from the birth of life

Robin Hanson (08:02.160)

to the initiation of major expansion. Right. So we're pretty sure that it would happen really

Robin Hanson (08:07.920)

soon so that it couldn't be the same sort of a hard step as the last one. So in terms of taking

Robin Hanson (08:12.720)

a long time. So when we look at the history of Earth, we look at the durations of the major

Robin Hanson (08:18.720)

things that have happened. That suggests that there's roughly say six hard steps that happened,

Robin Hanson (08:25.280)

say between three and 12, and that we have just achieved the last one that would take a long time.

Lex Fridman (08:32.240)

Which is?

Lex Fridman (08:34.000)

We don't know. But whatever it is, we've just achieved the last one.

Robin Hanson (08:38.480)

We're talking about humans or aliens here. So let's talk about some of these steps. So

Robin Hanson (08:42.960)

Earth is really special in some way. We don't exactly know the level of specialness. We don't

Robin Hanson (08:47.920)

really know which steps were the hardest or not because we just have a sample of one. But you're

Robin Hanson (08:53.600)

saying that there's three to 12 steps that we have to go through to get to where we are that are hard

Robin Hanson (08:58.800)

steps, hard to find by something that took a long time and is unlikely. There's a lot of ways to fail.

Robin Hanson (09:07.680)

There's a lot more ways to fail than to succeed. The first step would be sort of the very simplest

Robin Hanson (09:13.040)

form of life of any sort. And then we don't know whether that first sort is the first sort that we

Robin Hanson (09:20.400)

see in the historical record or not. But then some other steps are, say, the development of

Robin Hanson (09:24.560)

photosynthesis, the development of sexual reproduction. There's the development of

Robin Hanson (09:30.800)

eukaryote cells, which are certain kind of complicated cells that seems to have only

Robin Hanson (09:35.120)

appeared once. And then there's multicellularity, that is multiple cells coming together to large

Robin Hanson (09:40.960)

organisms like us. And in this statistical model of trying to fit all these steps into a finite

Robin Hanson (09:48.240)

window, the model actually predicts that these steps could be of varying difficulties. That is,

Robin Hanson (09:53.360)

they could each take different amounts of time on average. But if you're lucky enough that they all

Robin Hanson (09:58.400)

appear in a very short time, then the durations between them will be roughly equal. And the time

Robin Hanson (10:04.960)

remaining leftover in the rest of the window will also be the same length. So we at the moment have

Robin Hanson (10:10.080)

roughly a billion years left on Earth until simple life like us would no longer be possible.

Robin Hanson (10:16.400)

Life appeared roughly 400 million years after the very first time when life was possible at the very

Robin Hanson (10:21.120)

beginning. So those two numbers right there give you the rough estimate of six hard steps.

Robin Hanson (10:26.880)

Just to build up an intuition here. So we're trying to create a simple mathematical model

Robin Hanson (10:31.760)

of how life emerges and expands in the universe. And there's a section in this paper, how many

Robin Hanson (10:39.120)

hard steps? Question mark. Right. The two most plausibly diagnostic Earth durations seem to be

Robin Hanson (10:45.200)

the one remaining after now before Earth becomes uninhabitable for complex life. So you estimate

Lex Fridman (10:50.960)

how long Earth lasts, how many hard steps. There's windows for doing different hard steps,

Lex Fridman (10:59.600)

and you can sort of like cueing theory, mathematically estimate of like the solution

Robin Hanson (11:09.760)

or the passing of the hard steps or the taking of the hard steps. Sort of like coldly mathematical

Robin Hanson (11:15.920)

look. If life, pre expansionary life, requires n number of steps, what is the probability of taking

Robin Hanson (11:25.280)

those steps on an Earth that lasts a billion years or two billion years or five billion years

Robin Hanson (11:30.000)

or 10 billion years? And you say solving for E using the observed durations of 1.1 and 0.4

Robin Hanson (11:38.400)

then gives E values of 3.9 and 12.5 range 5.7 to 26 suggesting a middle estimate of at least six.

Robin Hanson (11:46.800)

That's where you said six hard steps. Right. Just to get to where we are. Right. We started at the

Robin Hanson (11:54.000)

bottom. Now we're here. That took six steps on average. The key point is on average, these things

Robin Hanson (12:00.880)

on any one random planet would take trillions or trillions of years, just a really long time.

Lex Fridman (12:07.680)

And so we're really lucky that they all happened really fast in a short time before our window

Robin Hanson (12:12.640)

closed. And the chance of that happening in that short window goes as that time period to the power

Robin Hanson (12:19.520)

of the number of steps. And so that was where the power we talked about before came from. And so

Robin Hanson (12:25.200)

that means in the history of the universe, we should overall roughly expect advanced life to

Robin Hanson (12:30.080)

appear as a power law in time. So that very early on, there was very little chance of anything

Robin Hanson (12:36.080)

appearing. And then later on as things appear, other things are appearing somewhat closer to

Robin Hanson (12:40.480)

them in time because they're all going as this power law. What is the power law? Can we, for

Robin Hanson (12:46.240)

people who are not math inclined, can you describe what a power law is? So say the function X is

Robin Hanson (12:52.240)

linear and X squared is quadratic. So it's the power of two. If we make X to the three, that's

Robin Hanson (12:59.440)

cubic or the power of three. And so X to the sixth is the power of six. And so we'd say

Robin Hanson (13:06.800)

life appears in the universe on a planet like Earth in that proportion to the time that it's

Robin Hanson (13:12.320)

been ready for life to appear. And that over the universe in general, it'll appear at roughly a

Lex Fridman (13:22.720)

power law like that. What is the X, what is N? Is it the number of hard steps?

Robin Hanson (13:27.600)

Yes, the number of hard steps. So that's the idea.

Robin Hanson (13:30.160)

It's like if you're gambling and you're doubling up every time, this is the probability you just

Robin Hanson (13:35.760)

keep winning. So it gets very unlikely very quickly. And so we're the result of this unlikely

Robin Hanson (13:45.040)

chain of successes. It's actually a lot like cancer. So the dominant model of cancer in an

Robin Hanson (13:50.400)

organism like each of us is that we have all these cells and in order to become cancerous,

Robin Hanson (13:55.520)

a single cell has to go through a number of mutations and these very unlikely mutations.

Lex Fridman (14:00.640)

And so any one cell is very unlikely to have any, have all these mutations happen by the time

Robin Hanson (14:05.280)

your lifespan's over. But we have enough cells in our body that the chance of any one cell

Robin Hanson (14:10.720)

producing cancer by the end of your life is actually pretty high, more like 40%.

Lex Fridman (14:15.200)

And so the chance of cancer appearing in your lifetime also goes as a power law,

Robin Hanson (14:19.440)

this power of the number of mutations that's required for any one cell in your body to become

Lex Fridman (14:24.000)

cancerous.

Robin Hanson (14:24.480)

The longer you live, the likely you are to have cancer cells.

Lex Fridman (14:28.800)

And the power is also roughly six. That is the chance of you getting cancer is

Robin Hanson (14:34.160)

roughly the power of six of the time you've been since you were born.

Robin Hanson (14:37.680)

It is perhaps not lost on people that you're comparing power laws of the survival or the

Robin Hanson (14:45.840)

arrival of the human species to cancerous cells.

Robin Hanson (14:50.160)

The same mathematical model, but of course, we might have a different value assumption

Robin Hanson (14:55.040)

about the two outcomes. But of course, from the point of view of cancer, it's more similar.

Robin Hanson (15:00.720)

For the point of view of cancer, it's a win win. We both get to thrive, I suppose.

Robin Hanson (15:09.120)

It is interesting to take the point of view of all kinds of life forms on earth,

Lex Fridman (15:13.200)

of viruses, of bacteria. They have a very different view.

Robin Hanson (15:18.160)

It's like the Instagram channel, Nature is Metal.

Robin Hanson (15:22.480)

The ethic under which nature operates doesn't often coincide, correlate with human

Robin Hanson (15:29.600)

morals. It seems cold and machine like in the selection process that it performs.

Robin Hanson (15:38.560)

I am an analyst, I'm a scholar, an intellectual, and I feel I should carefully distinguish

Robin Hanson (15:44.960)

predicting what's likely to happen and then evaluating or judging what I think would be

Robin Hanson (15:50.800)

better to happen. And it's a little dangerous to mix those up too closely because then we can

Robin Hanson (15:56.000)

then we can have wishful thinking. And so I try typically to just analyze what seems likely to

Robin Hanson (16:01.920)

happen regardless of whether I like it or that we do anything about it. And then once you see

Robin Hanson (16:07.360)

a rough picture of what's likely to happen if we do nothing, then we can ask, well, what might we

Lex Fridman (16:12.240)

prefer? And ask, where could the levers be to move it at least a little toward what we might prefer?

Lex Fridman (16:19.360)

But often doing that just analysis of what's likely to happen if we do nothing offends many

Robin Hanson (16:24.800)

people. They find that dehumanizing or cold or metal, as you say, to just say, well, this is

Robin Hanson (16:31.920)

what's likely to happen and it's not your favorite, sorry, but maybe we can do something, but maybe

Robin Hanson (16:39.280)

we can't do that much. This is very interesting that the cold analysis, whether it's geopolitics,

Robin Hanson (16:48.160)

whether it's medicine, whether it's economics, sometimes misses some very specific aspect of

Robin Hanson (16:59.440)

human condition. Like for example, when you look at a doctor and the act of a doctor helping a

Robin Hanson (17:07.680)

single patient, if you do the analysis of that doctor's time and cost of the medicine or the

Robin Hanson (17:14.320)

surgery or the transportation of the patient, this is the Paul Farmer question, you know, is it worth

Robin Hanson (17:20.960)

spending ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars on this one patient? When you look at all the people

Robin Hanson (17:26.320)

that are suffering in the world, that money could be spent so much better. And yet there's something

Robin Hanson (17:31.840)

about human nature that wants to help the person in front of you, and that is actually the right

Robin Hanson (17:39.120)

thing to do, despite the analysis. And sometimes when you do the analysis, there's something

Robin Hanson (17:46.800)

about the human mind that allows you to not take that leap, that irrational leap to act in this way,

Robin Hanson (17:54.880)

that the analysis explains it away. Well it's like, for example, the U.S. government, you know, the

Robin Hanson (18:02.240)

DOT, Department of Transportation, puts a value of I think like nine million dollars on a human life.

Lex Fridman (18:09.120)

And the moment you put that number on a human life, you can start thinking, well okay, I can start

Robin Hanson (18:13.840)

making decisions about this or that, and with a sort of cold economic perspective, and then you

Robin Hanson (18:20.800)

might lose, you might deviate from a deeper truth of what it means to be human somehow. You have to

Robin Hanson (18:28.720)

dance, because then if you put too much weight on the anecdotal evidence on these kinds of human

Robin Hanson (18:35.680)

emotions, then you're going to lose, you could also probably more likely deviate from truth.

Lex Fridman (18:42.800)

But there's something about that cold analysis. Like I've been listening to a lot of people

Robin Hanson (18:47.120)

coldly analyze wars. War in Yemen, war in Syria, Israel, Palestine, war in Ukraine, and there's

Robin Hanson (18:56.640)

something lost when you do a cold analysis of why something happened. When you talk about energy,

Robin Hanson (19:03.920)

talking about sort of conflict, competition over resources, when you talk about geopolitics,

Robin Hanson (19:11.200)

sort of models of geopolitics, and why a certain war happened, you lose something about the suffering

Robin Hanson (19:16.640)

that happens. I don't know. It's an interesting thing, because you're both, you're exceptionally good

Robin Hanson (19:22.000)

at models in all domains, literally, but also there's a humanity to you. So it's an interesting

Robin Hanson (19:31.760)

dance. I don't know if you can comment on that dance. Sure. It's definitely true, as you say,

Robin Hanson (19:37.360)

that for many people, if you are accurate in your judgment of, say, for a medical patient,

Robin Hanson (19:43.920)

what's the chance that this treatment might help? And what's the cost? And compare those

Robin Hanson (19:50.640)

to each other, and you might say, this looks like a lot of cost for a small medical gain.

Lex Fridman (19:58.480)

And at that point, knowing that fact, that might take the air out of your sails. You might

Robin Hanson (1:00:01.920)

half of your genes and your descendants are a generation away. So we only care about our

Robin Hanson (1:00:06.640)

grandchildren. Basically that's a factor of four later because it's later. So this actually

Robin Hanson (1:00:14.320)

explains typical interest rates in the economy. That is interest rates are greatly influenced by

Robin Hanson (1:00:19.360)

our discount rates. And we basically discount the future by a factor of two per generation.

Lex Fridman (1:00:25.920)

But that's a side effect of the way our preferences evolved as sexually selected

Robin Hanson (1:00:32.400)

creatures. We should expect that in the longer run creatures will evolve who don't discount the

Robin Hanson (1:00:37.920)

future. They will care about the long run and they will therefore not neglect the long run.

Lex Fridman (1:00:43.360)

So for example, for things like global warming or things like that, at the moment, many commenters

Robin Hanson (1:00:48.880)

are sad that basically ordinary people don't seem to care much, market prices don't seem to care

Robin Hanson (1:00:52.640)

much and more ordinary people, it doesn't really impact them much because humans don't care much

Robin Hanson (1:00:57.200)

about the longterm future. And futurists find it hard to motivate people and to engage people about

Robin Hanson (1:01:04.240)

the longterm future because they just don't care that much. But that's a side effect of this

Robin Hanson (1:01:08.640)

particular way that our preferences evolved about the future. And so in the future, they will neglect

Robin Hanson (1:01:14.640)

the future less. And that's an interesting thing that we can predict robustly. Eventually,

Robin Hanson (1:01:19.680)

you know, maybe a few centuries, maybe longer, eventually our descendants will

Lex Fridman (1:01:24.720)

care about the future. Can you speak to the intuition behind that? Is it

Robin Hanson (1:01:29.520)

useful to think more about the future? Right. If evolution rewards creatures for having many

Robin Hanson (1:01:35.520)

descendants, then if you have decisions that influence how many descendants you have,

Robin Hanson (1:01:40.720)

then that would be good if you made those decisions. But in order to do that, you'll have to

Robin Hanson (1:01:44.400)

care about them. You have to care about that future. So to push back, that's if you're trying

Robin Hanson (1:01:49.840)

to maximize the number of descendants. But the nice thing about not caring too much about the

Robin Hanson (1:01:54.320)

longterm future is you're more likely to take big risks or you're less risk averse. And it's possible

Robin Hanson (1:02:01.200)

that both evolution and just life in the universe rewards the risk takers. Well, we actually have

Robin Hanson (1:02:11.760)

analysis of the ideal risk preferences too. So there's a literature on ideal preferences that

Robin Hanson (1:02:19.200)

evolution should promote. And for example, there's literature on competing investment funds and what

Robin Hanson (1:02:24.400)

the managers of those funds should care about in terms of risk, various kinds of risks, and in terms

Robin Hanson (1:02:29.680)

of discounting. And so managers of investment funds should basically have logarithmic risk, i.e. in

Robin Hanson (1:02:38.880)

shared risk, in correlated risk, but be very risk neutral with respect to uncorrelated risk. So

Robin Hanson (1:02:47.040)

that's a feature that's predicted to happen about individual personal choices in biology and also

Robin Hanson (1:02:54.000)

for investment funds. So that's other things. That's also something we can say about the long

Robin Hanson (1:02:57.200)

run. What's correlated and uncorrelated risk? If there's something that would affect all of your

Robin Hanson (1:03:03.440)

descendants, then if you take that risk, you might have more descendants, but you might have zero.

Lex Fridman (1:03:11.040)

And that's just really bad to have zero descendants. But an uncorrelated risk would be a

Robin Hanson (1:03:16.080)

risk that some of your descendants would suffer, but others wouldn't. And then you have a portfolio

Robin Hanson (1:03:20.880)

of descendants. And so that portfolio ensures you against problems with any one of them.

Robin Hanson (1:03:26.000)

I like the idea of portfolio descendants. And we'll talk about portfolios with your idea of

Robin Hanson (1:03:31.680)

you briefly mentioned, we'll return there with M, EM, the age of EM, work, love, and life when

Lex Fridman (1:03:37.840)

robots rule the earth. EM, by the way, is emulated minds. So this one of the...

Robin Hanson (1:03:44.160)

M is short for emulations.

Robin Hanson (1:03:46.160)

M is short for emulations. And it's kind of an idea of how we might create artificial minds,

Robin Hanson (1:03:51.600)

artificial copies of minds, or human like intelligences.

Lex Fridman (1:03:56.880)

I have another dramatic prediction I can make about long term preferences.

Robin Hanson (1:04:00.640)

Yes.

Robin Hanson (1:04:01.440)

Which is, at the moment, we reproduce as the result of a hodgepodge of preferences that

Robin Hanson (1:04:07.280)

aren't very well integrated, but sort of in our ancestral environment induced us to reproduce.

Lex Fridman (1:04:12.240)

So we have preferences over being sleepy and hungry and thirsty and wanting to have sex and

Robin Hanson (1:04:17.920)

wanting to be excitement, et cetera, right? And so in our ancestral environment, the packages

Robin Hanson (1:04:23.600)

of preferences that we evolved to have did induce us to have more descendants. That's why we're here.

Lex Fridman (1:04:31.040)

But those packages of preferences are not a robust way to promote having more descendants.

Robin Hanson (1:04:36.560)

They were tied to our ancestral environment, which is no longer true. So that's one of the

Robin Hanson (1:04:40.480)

reasons we are now having a big fertility decline because in our current environment,

Lex Fridman (1:04:45.360)

our ancestral preferences are not inducing us to have a lot of kids,

Robin Hanson (1:04:48.720)

which is, from evolution's point of view, a big mistake.

Lex Fridman (1:04:52.320)

We can predict that in the longer run, there will arise creatures who

Robin Hanson (1:04:56.880)

just abstractly know that what they want is more descendants.

Robin Hanson (1:05:00.800)

That's a very robust way to have more descendants is to have that as your direct preference.

Robin Hanson (1:05:05.840)

First of all, your thinking is so clear. I love it. So mathematical. And thank you

Robin Hanson (1:05:11.360)

for thinking so clear with me and bearing with my interruptions and going on the tangents when we go

Robin Hanson (1:05:19.360)

there. So you're just clearly saying that successful long term civilizations will prefer to have

Lex Fridman (1:05:27.920)

descendants, more descendants.

Robin Hanson (1:05:30.080)

Not just prefer, consciously and abstractly prefer. That is, it won't be the indirect

Lex Fridman (1:05:35.920)

consequence of other preference. It will just be the thing they know they want.

Robin Hanson (1:05:39.920)

There'll be a president in the future that says, we must have more sex.

Lex Fridman (1:05:44.640)

We must have more descendants and do whatever it takes to do that.

Robin Hanson (1:05:47.600)

Whatever. We must go to the moon and do the other things. Not because they're easy,

Lex Fridman (1:05:52.640)

but because they're hard. But instead of the moon, let's have lots of sex. Okay.

Lex Fridman (1:05:56.000)

But there's a lot of ways to have descendants, right?

Robin Hanson (1:05:58.880)

Right. So that's the whole point. When the world gets more complicated and there are many possible

Robin Hanson (1:06:03.040)

strategies, it's having that as your abstract preference that will force you to think through

Lex Fridman (1:06:07.520)

those possibilities and pick the one that's most effective.

Lex Fridman (1:06:09.920)

So just to clarify, descendants doesn't necessarily mean the narrow definition of

Lex Fridman (1:06:15.360)

descendants, meaning humans having sex and then having babies.

Robin Hanson (1:06:18.480)

Exactly.

Robin Hanson (1:06:18.880)

You can have artificial intelligence systems in whom you instill some capability of cognition

Lex Fridman (1:06:27.120)

and perhaps even consciousness. You can also create through genetics and biology clones of yourself

Robin Hanson (1:06:32.720)

or slightly modified clones, thousands of them. So all kinds of descendants. It could be descendants

Robin Hanson (1:06:41.600)

in the space of ideas too, for somehow we no longer exist in this meat vehicle. It's now just

Robin Hanson (1:06:47.360)

like whatever the definition of a life form is, you have descendants of those life forms.

Robin Hanson (1:06:54.320)

Yes. And they will be thoughtful about that. They will have thought about what counts as a

Lex Fridman (1:06:58.800)

descendant and that'll be important to them to have the right concept.

Lex Fridman (1:07:02.240)

So the they there is very interesting, who the they are.

Lex Fridman (1:07:05.920)

But the key thing is we're making predictions that I think are somewhat robust about what

Robin Hanson (1:07:10.160)

our distant descendants will be like. Another thing I think you would automatically accept is

Robin Hanson (1:07:14.000)

they will almost entirely be artificial. And I think that would be the obvious prediction

Robin Hanson (1:07:17.840)

about any aliens we would meet. That is they would long since have given up reproducing

Lex Fridman (1:07:22.800)

biologically.

Robin Hanson (1:07:24.080)

Well, it's like organic or something. It's all real.

Robin Hanson (1:07:28.400)

It might be squishy and made out of hydrocarbons, but it would be artificial in the sense of made

Robin Hanson (1:07:33.040)

in factories with designs on CAD things, right? Factories with scale economy. So the factories

Robin Hanson (1:07:37.840)

we have made on earth today have much larger scale economies than the factories in ourselves.

Lex Fridman (1:07:42.000)

So the factories in ourselves are, there are marvels, but they don't achieve very many scale

Lex Fridman (1:07:46.320)

economies. They're tiny little factories.

Lex Fridman (1:07:47.920)

But they're all factories.

Lex Fridman (1:07:49.040)

Yes.

Robin Hanson (1:07:49.440)

Factories on top of factories. So everything, the factories that are designed is different

Lex Fridman (1:07:54.800)

than sort of the factories that have evolved.

Robin Hanson (1:07:56.480)

Yeah. I think the nature of the word design is very interesting to uncover there. But

Robin Hanson (1:08:02.480)

let me, in terms of aliens, let me go, let me analyze your Twitter like it's Shakespeare.

Robin Hanson (1:08:09.440)

Okay.

Robin Hanson (1:08:10.240)

There's a tweet says, define hello, in quotes, alien civilizations as one that might the

Robin Hanson (1:08:16.880)

next million years identify humans as intelligent and civilized, travel to earth and say hello

Robin Hanson (1:08:24.000)

by making their presence and advanced abilities known to us. The next 15 polls, this is a

Robin Hanson (1:08:29.360)

Twitter thread, the next 15 polls ask about such hello aliens. And what these polls ask

Robin Hanson (1:08:35.680)

is your Twitter followers, what they think those aliens will be like certain particular

Robin Hanson (1:08:42.960)

qualities. So poll number one is what percent of hello aliens evolved from biological species

Robin Hanson (1:08:49.520)

with two main genders? And you know, the popular vote is above 80%. So most of them have two

Robin Hanson (1:08:58.000)

genders. What do you think about that? I'll ask you about some of these because they're

Lex Fridman (1:09:00.880)

so interesting. It's such an interesting question.

Robin Hanson (1:09:02.480)

It is a fun set of questions.

Robin Hanson (1:09:03.520)

Yes, it's a fun set of questions. So the genders as we look through evolutionary history, what's

Lex Fridman (1:09:08.400)

the usefulness of that as opposed to having just one or like millions?

Lex Fridman (1:09:13.520)

So there's a question in evolution of life on earth, there are very few species that

Robin Hanson (1:09:18.240)

have more than two genders. There are some, but they aren't very many. But there's an

Robin Hanson (1:09:22.800)

enormous number of species that do have two genders, much more than one. And so there's

Robin Hanson (1:09:27.440)

a literature on why did multiple genders evolve, and that's sort of what's the point of having

Robin Hanson (1:09:34.080)

males and females versus hermaphrodites. So most plants are hermaphrodites, that is they

Robin Hanson (1:09:40.960)

would mate male female, but each plant can be either role. And then most animals have

Robin Hanson (1:09:47.520)

chosen to split into males and females. And then they're differentiating the two genders.

Lex Fridman (1:09:52.880)

And there's an interesting set of questions about why that happens.

Robin Hanson (1:09:56.320)

Because you can do selection, you basically have like one gender competes for the affection

Robin Hanson (1:10:03.760)

of other and there's sexual partnership that creates the offspring. So there's sexual

Robin Hanson (1:10:08.240)

selection. It's nice to have like to a party, it's nice to have dance partners. And then

Robin Hanson (1:10:14.000)

then each one get to choose based on certain characteristics. And that's an efficient

Robin Hanson (1:10:18.880)

mechanism for adapting to the environment, being successfully adapted to the environment.

Robin Hanson (1:10:24.400)

It does look like there's an advantage. If you have males, then the males can take higher

Robin Hanson (1:10:29.760)

variants. And so there can be stronger selection among the males in terms of weeding out genetic

Robin Hanson (1:10:34.240)

mutations because the males have a higher variance in their mating success.

Robin Hanson (1:10:38.240)

Yes. Sure. Okay. Question number two, what percent of hello aliens evolved from land

Robin Hanson (1:10:44.720)

animals as opposed to plants or ocean slash air organisms? By the way, I did recently

Robin Hanson (1:10:53.680)

see that there's only 10% of species on earth are in the ocean. So there's a lot more variety

Robin Hanson (1:11:03.600)

on land. There is. It's interesting. So why is that? I can't even intuit exactly why that would

Robin Hanson (1:11:10.480)

be. Maybe survival on land is harder and so you get a lot more. The story that I understand is

Robin Hanson (1:11:16.160)

it's about small niches. So speciation can be promoted by having multiple different species.

Lex Fridman (1:11:23.200)

So in the ocean, species are larger. That is there are more creatures in each species because the

Robin Hanson (1:11:29.520)

ocean environments don't vary as much. So if you're good in one place, you're good in many

Robin Hanson (1:11:33.040)

other places. But on land, and especially in rivers, rivers contain an enormous percentage of

Robin Hanson (1:11:38.400)

the kinds of species on land, you see, because they vary so much from place to place. And so

Robin Hanson (1:11:46.800)

a species can be good in one place and then other species can't really compete because they came

Robin Hanson (1:11:51.440)

from a different place where things are different. So it's a remarkable fact actually that speciation

Robin Hanson (1:11:58.640)

promotes evolution in the long run. That is more evolution has happened on land because there have

Robin Hanson (1:12:03.440)

been more species on land because each species has been smaller. And that's actually a warning

Robin Hanson (1:12:08.800)

about something called rot that I've thought a lot about, which is one of the problems with

Robin Hanson (1:12:13.360)

even a world government, which is large systems of software today just consistently rot and decay

Robin Hanson (1:12:19.120)

with time and have to be replaced. And that plausibly also is a problem for other large

Robin Hanson (1:12:23.440)

systems, including biological systems, legal systems, regulatory systems. And it seems like

Robin Hanson (1:12:29.760)

large species actually don't evolve as effectively as small ones do. And that's an important thing

Robin Hanson (1:12:36.720)

to notice about that. And that's different from ordinary sort of evolution in economies on Earth

Robin Hanson (1:12:44.640)

in the last few centuries, say. On Earth, the more technical evolution and economic growth happens in

Robin Hanson (1:12:51.280)

larger integrated cities and nations. But in biology, it's the other way around. More evolution

Robin Hanson (1:12:56.800)

happened in the fragmented species. Yeah, it's such a nuanced discussion because you can also

Robin Hanson (1:13:02.800)

push back in terms of nations and at least companies. It's like large companies seems to evolve

Robin Hanson (1:13:08.640)

less effectively. There is something that they have more resources, they don't even have better

Robin Hanson (1:13:17.760)

resilience. And when you look at the scale of decades and centuries, it seems like a lot of

Robin Hanson (1:13:23.440)

large companies die. But still large economies do better, like large cities grow better than small

Robin Hanson (1:13:29.440)

cities. Large integrated economies like the United States or the European Union do better than small

Robin Hanson (1:13:34.240)

fragmented ones. So, yeah, sure. That's a very interesting, long discussion. But so most of the

Robin Hanson (1:13:41.040)

people, and obviously votes on Twitter represent the absolute objective truth of things.

Lex Fridman (1:13:48.240)

But an interesting question about oceans is that, okay, remember I told you about how most

Robin Hanson (1:13:52.800)

planets would last for trillions of years and be later, right? So people have tried to explain why

Robin Hanson (1:13:58.640)

life appeared on Earth by saying, oh, all those planets are going to be unqualified for life

Robin Hanson (1:14:02.800)

because of various problems. That is, they're around smaller stars, which last longer, and

Robin Hanson (1:14:06.320)

smaller stars have some things like more solar flares, maybe more tidal locking. But almost

Robin Hanson (1:14:11.920)

all of these problems with longer lived planets aren't problems for ocean worlds. And a large

Robin Hanson (1:14:17.680)

fraction of planets out there are ocean worlds. So if life can appear on an ocean world, then

Robin Hanson (1:14:23.520)

that pretty much ensures that these planets that last a very long time could have advanced life

Robin Hanson (1:14:30.240)

because there's a huge fraction of ocean worlds. So that's actually an open question.

Lex Fridman (1:14:34.480)

So when you say, sorry, when you say life appear, you're kind of saying life and intelligent life.

Lex Fridman (1:14:41.840)

So that's an open question. Is land, and that's I suppose the question behind

Robin Hanson (1:14:50.640)

the Twitter poll, which is a grabby alien civilization that comes to say hello,

Robin Hanson (1:14:57.360)

what's the chance that they first began their early steps, the difficult steps they took on

Robin Hanson (1:15:04.000)

land? What do you think? 80%, most people on Twitter think it's very likely on land.

Robin Hanson (1:15:14.320)

I think people are discounting ocean worlds too much. That is, I think people tend to assume that

Robin Hanson (1:15:20.480)

whatever we did must be the only way it's possible. And I think people aren't giving

Lex Fridman (1:15:23.840)

enough credit for other possible paths. Dolphins, Waterworld, by the way,

Robin Hanson (1:15:28.720)

people criticize that movie. I love that movie. Kevin Costner can do me no wrong.

Robin Hanson (1:15:32.960)

Okay, next question. What percent of hello aliens once had a nuclear war with greater

Robin Hanson (1:15:39.600)

than 10 nukes fired in anger? So not in the incompetence and as an accident,

Lex Fridman (1:15:47.680)

intentional firing of nukes and less than 20% was the most popular vote.

Lex Fridman (1:15:54.000)

And that just seems wrong to me.

Lex Fridman (1:15:56.240)

So like, I wonder what, so most people think once you get nukes, we're not going to fire them.

Robin Hanson (1:16:02.400)

They believe in the power.

Robin Hanson (1:16:04.880)

I think they're assuming that if you had a nuclear war, then that would just end

Robin Hanson (1:16:08.240)

civilization for good. I think that's the thinking.

Lex Fridman (1:16:10.720)

That's the main thing.

Lex Fridman (1:16:11.760)

And I think that's just wrong. I think you could rise again after a nuclear war.

Lex Fridman (1:16:15.120)

It might take 10,000 years or 100,000 years, but it could rise again.

Lex Fridman (1:16:18.800)

So what do you think about mutual assured destruction

Robin Hanson (1:16:21.520)

as a force to prevent people from firing nuclear weapons? That's a question that I knew

Robin Hanson (1:16:28.480)

to a terrifying degree has been raised now and what's going on.

Robin Hanson (1:16:31.920)

Well, I mean, clearly it has had an effect. The question is just how strong an effect for how

Robin Hanson (1:16:36.800)

long. I mean, clearly we have not gone wild with nuclear war and clearly the devastation that you

Robin Hanson (1:16:43.680)

would get if you initiated a nuclear war is part of the reasons people have been reluctant to start

Lex Fridman (1:16:47.520)

a war. The question is just how reliably will that ensure the absence of a war?

Lex Fridman (1:16:52.800)

Yeah. The night is still young.

Robin Hanson (1:16:54.400)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (1:16:54.800)

This has been 70 years or whatever it's been.

Lex Fridman (1:16:57.360)

I mean, but what do you think? Do you think we'll see nuclear war in the century?

Robin Hanson (1:17:06.880)

I don't know if in the century, but it's the sort of thing that's likely to happen eventually.

Robin Hanson (1:17:12.800)

That's a very loose statement. Okay. I understand. Now this is where I pull you out of your

Robin Hanson (1:17:17.200)

mathematical model and ask a human question. Do you think this particular human question...

Robin Hanson (1:17:22.480)

I think we've been lucky that it hasn't happened so far.

Lex Fridman (1:17:24.720)

But what is the nature of nuclear war? Let's think about this. There's dictators, there's democracies,

Robin Hanson (1:17:36.800)

miscommunication. How do wars start? World War I, World War II.

Lex Fridman (1:17:40.480)

So the biggest datum here is that we've had an enormous decline in major war over the last

Robin Hanson (1:17:46.000)

century. So that has to be taken into account now. So the problem is war is a process that has a very

Robin Hanson (1:17:52.960)

long tail. That is, there are rare, very large wars. So the average war is much worse than the

Robin Hanson (1:18:00.640)

median war because of this long tail. And that makes it hard to identify trends over time. So

Robin Hanson (1:18:08.080)

the median war has clearly gone way down in the last century at a medium rate of war. But it could

Robin Hanson (1:18:12.480)

be that's because the tail has gotten thicker. And in fact, the average war is just as bad,

Lex Fridman (1:18:17.200)

but most wars are gonna be big wars. So that's the thing we're not so sure about.

Robin Hanson (1:18:21.440)

There's no strong data on wars with one, because of the destructive nature of the weapons,

Lex Fridman (1:18:31.600)

kill hundreds of millions of people. There's no data on this.

Robin Hanson (1:18:35.440)

So, but we can start intuiting.

Lex Fridman (1:18:37.360)

But we can see that the power law, we can do a power law fit to the rate of wars and it's a

Robin Hanson (1:18:42.080)

power law with a thick tail. So it's one of those things that you should expect most of the damage

Robin Hanson (1:18:46.560)

to be in the few biggest ones. So that's also true for pandemics and a few other things. For

Robin Hanson (1:18:51.200)

pandemics, most of the damages in the few biggest ones. So the median pandemics of ours, less than

Robin Hanson (1:18:55.840)

the average that you should expect in the future. But those, that fitting of data is very questionable

Robin Hanson (1:19:02.880)

because everything you said is correct. The question is like, what can we infer about the

Robin Hanson (1:19:09.120)

future of civilization, threatening pandemics or nuclear war from studying the history of the

Robin Hanson (1:19:19.520)

20th century? So like, you can't just fit it to the data, the rate of wars and the destructive

Robin Hanson (1:19:25.120)

nature. Like that's not, that's not how nuclear war will happen. Nuclear war happens with two

Robin Hanson (1:19:31.360)

assholes or idiots that have access to a button.

Lex Fridman (1:19:35.120)

Small wars happen that way too.

Robin Hanson (1:19:36.880)

No, I understand that, but that's, it's very important. Small wars aside, it's very important

Robin Hanson (1:19:41.600)

to understand the dynamics, the human dynamics and the geopolitics of the way nuclear war happens

Robin Hanson (1:19:46.720)

in order to predict how we can minimize the chance of a...

Lex Fridman (1:19:51.520)

But it is a common and useful intellectual strategy to take something that could be really

Robin Hanson (1:19:56.800)

big or, but is often very small and fit the distribution of the data, small things, which

Lex Fridman (1:20:01.120)

you have a lot of them and then ask, do I believe the big things are really that different? Right?

Robin Hanson (1:20:05.280)

I see.

Lex Fridman (1:20:05.760)

So sometimes it's reasonable to say like, say with tornadoes or even pandemics or something,

Robin Hanson (1:20:10.400)

the underlying process might not be that different for the big and small ones.

Robin Hanson (1:20:14.960)

It might not be. The fact that mutual sure destruction seems to work to some degree

Robin Hanson (1:20:23.680)

shows you that to some degree it's different than the small wars.

Lex Fridman (1:20:31.040)

So it's a really important question to understand is, are humans capable, one human, like how many

Robin Hanson (1:20:40.880)

humans on earth, if I give them a button now, say you pressing this button will kill everyone on

Robin Hanson (1:20:46.960)

earth, everyone, right? How many humans will press that button? I want to know those numbers,

Robin Hanson (1:20:53.600)

like day to day, minute to minute, how many people have that much irresponsibility, evil,

Robin Hanson (1:21:01.040)

incompetence, ignorance, whatever word you want to assign, there's a lot of dynamics of the

Robin Hanson (1:21:06.240)

psychology that leads you to press that button, but how many? My intuition is the number, the more

Robin Hanson (1:21:12.320)

destructive that press of a button, the fewer humans you find. And that number gets very close

Robin Hanson (1:21:17.520)

to zero very quickly, especially people have access to such a button, but that's perhaps

Lex Fridman (1:21:24.560)

a hope than a reality. And unfortunately we don't have good data on this,

Lex Fridman (1:21:28.240)

which is like how destructive are humans willing to be?

Lex Fridman (1:21:34.480)

So I think part of this just has to think about, ask what your time scales you're looking at,

Robin Hanson (1:21:39.920)

right? So if you say, if you look at the history of war, you know, we've had a lot of wars pretty

Robin Hanson (1:21:44.880)

consistently over many centuries. So if I ask, if you ask, will we have a nuclear war in the

Robin Hanson (1:21:50.000)

next 50 years? I might say, well, probably not. If I say 500 or 5,000 years, like if the same sort

Robin Hanson (1:21:56.400)

of risks are underlying and they just continue, then you have to add that up over time and think

Robin Hanson (1:22:00.960)

the risk is getting a lot larger the longer a timescale we're looking at.

Lex Fridman (1:22:04.400)

But okay, let's generalize nuclear war because what I was more referring to is something that

Robin Hanson (1:22:09.920)

kills more than 20% of humans on earth and injures or makes the other 80%

Robin Hanson (1:22:25.680)

suffer horribly, survive, but suffer. That's what I was referring to. So when you look at 500 years

Robin Hanson (1:22:32.320)

from now, that might not be nuclear war. That might be something else. That's that kind of,

Robin Hanson (1:22:36.640)

has that destructive effect. And I don't know, these feel like novel questions in the history

Robin Hanson (1:22:45.280)

of humanity. I just don't know. I think since nuclear weapons, this has been, you know,

Robin Hanson (1:22:52.400)

engineering pandemics, for example, robotics, so nanobots. It just seems like a real new

Robin Hanson (1:23:02.560)

possibility that we have to contend with it. We don't have good models or from my perspective.

Lex Fridman (1:23:08.160)

So if you look on say the last thousand years or 10,000 years, we could say we've seen a certain

Robin Hanson (1:23:13.280)

rate at which people are willing to make big destruction in terms of war. Okay. And if you're

Robin Hanson (1:23:19.680)

willing to project that data forward, that I think like if you want to ask over periods of

Robin Hanson (1:23:23.920)

thousands or tens of thousands of years, you would have a reasonable data set. So the key

Robin Hanson (1:23:28.000)

question is what's changed lately? Okay. And so a big question of which I've given a lot of thought

Robin Hanson (1:23:34.960)

to what are the major changes that seem to have happened in culture and human attitudes over the

Robin Hanson (1:23:39.920)

last few centuries and what's our best explanation for those so that we can project them forward into

Robin Hanson (1:23:44.160)

the future. And I have a story about that, which is the story that we have been drifting back toward

Robin Hanson (1:23:51.600)

forager attitudes in the last few centuries as we get rich. So the idea is we spent a million years

Robin Hanson (1:23:57.920)

being a forager and that was a very sort of standard lifestyle that we know a lot about.

Robin Hanson (1:24:04.480)

Foragers sort of live in small bands. They make decisions cooperatively. They share food. They,

Robin Hanson (1:24:10.080)

you know, they don't have much property, et cetera. And humans liked that. And then 10,000 years ago,

Robin Hanson (1:24:16.800)

farming became possible, but it was only possible because we were plastic enough to really change

Robin Hanson (1:24:21.280)

our culture. Farming styles and cultures are very different. They have slavery, they have war,

Robin Hanson (1:24:25.840)

they have property, they have inequality, they have kings. They stay in one place instead of

Robin Hanson (1:24:30.880)

wandering. They don't have as much diversity of experience or food. They have more disease.

Robin Hanson (1:24:35.920)

This farming life is just very different. But humans were able to sort of introduce conformity

Lex Fridman (1:24:41.600)

and religion and all sorts of things to become just a very different kind of creature as farmers.

Robin Hanson (1:24:45.280)

Farmers are just really different than foragers in terms of their values and their lives.

Lex Fridman (1:24:49.920)

But the pressures that made foragers into farmers were part mediated by poverty.

Robin Hanson (1:24:55.120)

Farmers are poor. And if they deviated from the farming norms that people around them supported,

Robin Hanson (1:25:00.080)

they were quite at risk of starving to death. And then in the last few centuries,

Robin Hanson (1:25:05.440)

we've gotten rich. And as we've gotten rich, the social pressures that turned foragers into farmers

Robin Hanson (1:25:11.920)

have become less persuasive to us. So, for example, a farming young woman who was told,

Robin Hanson (1:25:18.000)

if you have a child out of wedlock, you and your child may starve, that was a credible threat.

Robin Hanson (1:25:22.640)

She would see actual examples around her to make that a believable threat. Today,

Robin Hanson (1:25:28.000)

if you say to a young woman, you shouldn't have a child out of wedlock, she will see other young

Robin Hanson (1:25:31.760)

woman around her doing okay that way. We're all rich enough to be able to afford that sort of a

Robin Hanson (1:25:36.320)

thing. And therefore, she's more inclined often to go with her inclinations, her sort of more

Robin Hanson (1:25:42.400)

natural inclinations about such things rather than to be pressured to follow the official

Robin Hanson (1:25:47.520)

farming norms of that you shouldn't do that sort of thing. And all through our lives, we have been

Robin Hanson (1:25:51.440)

drifting back toward forager attitudes because we've been getting rich. And so, aside from at

Robin Hanson (1:25:57.920)

work, which is an exception, but elsewhere, I think this explains trends toward less slavery,

Robin Hanson (1:26:04.000)

more democracy, less religion, less fertility, more promiscuity, more travel, more art, more leisure,

Robin Hanson (1:26:12.160)

fewer work hours. All of these trends are basically explained by becoming more forager like.

Lex Fridman (1:26:18.960)

And much science fiction celebrates this, Star Trek or the culture novels, people

Robin Hanson (1:26:23.360)

like this image that we are moving toward this world. We're basically like foragers, we're peaceful,

Robin Hanson (1:26:27.840)

we share, we make decisions collectively, we have a lot of free time, we are into art.

Lex Fridman (1:26:34.880)

So forger, you know, forger is a word and it has, it's a loaded word because it's connected to

Robin Hanson (1:26:42.880)

the actual, what life was actually like at that time. As you mentioned, we sometimes don't do a

Robin Hanson (1:26:49.200)

good job of telling accurately what life was like back then. But you're saying if it's not exactly

Robin Hanson (1:26:55.120)

like foragers, it rhymes in some fundamental way. You also said peaceful. Is it obvious that a

Robin Hanson (1:27:01.920)

forager with a nuclear weapon would be peaceful? I don't know if that's 100% obvious. So we know,

Robin Hanson (1:27:10.080)

again, we know a fair bit about what foragers lives were like. The main sort of violence they

Robin Hanson (1:27:14.960)

had would be sexual jealousy. They were relatively promiscuous and so there'd be a lot of jealousy.

Lex Fridman (1:27:19.600)

But they did not have organized wars with each other. That is, they were at peace with their

Robin Hanson (1:27:24.480)

neighboring forager bands. They didn't have property in land or even in people. They didn't

Robin Hanson (1:27:28.880)

really have marriage. And so they were, in fact, peaceful.

Lex Fridman (1:27:35.440)

When you think about large scale wars, they don't start large scale wars.

Robin Hanson (1:27:38.400)

They didn't have coordinated large scale wars like the way chimpanzees do. Our chimpanzees do

Robin Hanson (1:27:42.560)

have wars between one tribe of chimpanzees and others, but human foragers do not. Farmers return

Robin Hanson (1:27:47.440)

to that, of course, the more chimpanzee like styles. Well, that's a hopeful message. If we

Robin Hanson (1:27:52.800)

could return real quick to the Hello Aliens Twitter thread. One of them is really interesting

Lex Fridman (1:28:00.160)

about language. What percent of Hello Aliens would be able to talk to us in our language?

Robin Hanson (1:28:05.280)

This is the question of communication. It actually gets to the nature of language.

Robin Hanson (1:28:10.080)

It also gets to the nature of how advanced you expect them to be.

Lex Fridman (1:28:16.240)

So I think some people see that we have advanced over the last thousands of years,

Lex Fridman (1:28:22.880)

and we aren't reaching any sort of limit. And so they tend to assume it could go on forever.

Lex Fridman (1:28:28.240)

And I actually tend to think that within, say, 10 million years, we will sort of max out on

Robin Hanson (1:28:34.400)

technology. We will sort of learn everything that's feasible to know for the most part. And then

Robin Hanson (1:28:40.960)

obstacles to understanding would more be about sort of cultural differences, like ways in which

Robin Hanson (1:28:45.680)

different places had just chosen to do things differently. And so then the question is, is it

Robin Hanson (1:28:52.080)

even possible to communicate across some cultural distances? And I could imagine some maybe advanced

Robin Hanson (1:28:59.760)

aliens who just become so weird and different from each other, they can't communicate with each other.

Lex Fridman (1:29:03.680)

But we're probably pretty simple compared to them. So I would think, sure, if they wanted to,

Robin Hanson (1:29:10.720)

they could communicate with us. So it's the simplicity of the recipient. I tend to,

Robin Hanson (1:29:17.200)

just to push back, let's explore the possibility where that's not the case. Can we communicate

Robin Hanson (1:29:23.600)

with ants? I find that this idea that... We're not very good at communicating in general.

Robin Hanson (1:29:33.280)

Oh, you're saying... All right, I see. You're saying once you get orders of magnitude better

Robin Hanson (1:29:38.400)

at communicating... Once they had maxed out on all communication technology in general,

Lex Fridman (1:29:43.440)

and they just understood in general how to communicate with lots of things, and had done

Robin Hanson (1:29:47.440)

that for millions of years. But you have to be able to... This is so interesting. As somebody

Robin Hanson (1:29:51.520)

who cares a lot about empathy and imagining how other people feel, communication requires empathy,

Robin Hanson (1:30:00.240)

meaning you have to truly understand how the other person, the other organism sees the world.

Robin Hanson (1:30:08.720)

It's like a four dimensional species talking to a two dimensional species. It's not as trivial as,

Robin Hanson (1:30:15.200)

to me at least, as it might at first seem. So let me reverse my position a little,

Robin Hanson (1:30:20.880)

because I'll say, well, the hello aliens question really combines two different scenarios

Robin Hanson (1:30:28.160)

that we're slipping over. So one scenario would be that the hello aliens would be like grabby

Robin Hanson (1:30:34.560)

aliens. They would be just fully advanced. They would have been expanding for millions of years.

Robin Hanson (1:30:38.400)

They would have a very advanced civilization, and then they would finally be arriving here

Robin Hanson (1:30:43.120)

after a billion years perhaps of expanding, in which case they're going to be crazy advanced

Robin Hanson (1:30:47.760)

at some maximal level. But the hello aliens about aliens we might meet soon, which might be sort of

Robin Hanson (1:30:55.040)

UFO aliens, and UFO aliens probably are not grabby aliens. How do you get here if you're

Robin Hanson (1:31:02.480)

not a grabby alien? Well, they would have to be able to travel. Oh. But they would not be expansive.

Lex Fridman (1:31:11.440)

So the road trip doesn't count as a grabby. So we're talking about expanding the colony,

Robin Hanson (1:31:17.200)

the comfortable colony. So the question is, if UFOs, some of them are aliens,

Lex Fridman (1:31:24.240)

what kind of aliens would they be? This is sort of the key question you have to ask in order to

Robin Hanson (1:31:28.880)

try to interpret that scenario. The key fact we would know is that they are here right now,

Lex Fridman (1:31:36.160)

but the universe around us is not full of an alien civilization. So that says right off the bat

Robin Hanson (1:31:43.520)

that they chose not to allow massive expansion of a grabby civilization.

Robin Hanson (1:31:50.240)

Is it possible that they chose it, but we just don't see them yet? These are the stragglers,

Robin Hanson (1:31:56.400)

the journeymen. So the timing coincidence is, it's almost surely if they are here now,

Robin Hanson (1:32:02.800)

they are much older than us. They are many millions of years older than us. And so they

Robin Hanson (1:32:08.400)

could have filled the galaxy in that last millions of years if they had wanted to.

Robin Hanson (1:32:13.360)

That is, they couldn't just be right at the edge. Very unlikely. Most likely they would have been

Robin Hanson (1:32:18.240)

around waiting for us for a long time. They could have come here any time in the last millions of

Robin Hanson (1:32:22.320)

years and they just chosen, they've been waiting around for this or they just chose to come

Robin Hanson (1:32:25.760)

recently. But the timing coincidence, it would be crazy unlikely that they just happen to be able to

Robin Hanson (1:32:31.520)

get here, say in the last hundred years. They would no doubt have been able to get here far

Robin Hanson (1:32:36.800)

earlier than that. Again, we don't know. So this is a friend like UFO sightings on earth. We don't

Robin Hanson (1:32:41.760)

know if this kind of increase in sightings have anything to do with actual visitations.

Robin Hanson (1:32:46.480)

I'm just talking about the timing. They arose at some point in space time.

Lex Fridman (1:32:52.080)

And it's very unlikely that that was just to the point that they could just barely get here

Robin Hanson (1:32:56.640)

recently. Almost surely they could have gotten here much earlier. And throughout the stretch

Robin Hanson (1:33:03.280)

of several billion years that earth existed, they could have been here often. Exactly. So

Robin Hanson (1:33:07.520)

they could have therefore filled the galaxy long time ago if they had wanted to. Let's push back

Robin Hanson (1:33:12.480)

on that. The question to me is, isn't it possible that the expansion of a civilization is much

Robin Hanson (1:33:20.080)

harder than the travel? The sphere of the reachable is different than the sphere of the colonized.

Lex Fridman (1:33:31.440)

So isn't it possible that the sphere of places where like the stragglers go, the different

Robin Hanson (1:33:38.560)

people that journey out, the explorers, is much, much larger and grows much faster than the

Robin Hanson (1:33:44.640)

civilization? So in which case, like they would visit us. There's a lot of visitors, the grad

Robin Hanson (1:33:51.040)

students of the civilization. They're like exploring, they're collecting the data, but

Lex Fridman (1:33:56.560)

we're not yet going to see them. And by yet, I mean across millions of years.

Robin Hanson (1:34:01.280)

The time delay between when the first thing might arrive and then when colonists could arrive in

Robin Hanson (1:34:10.400)

mass and do a mass amount of work is cosmologically short. In human history, of course, sure, there

Robin Hanson (1:34:16.480)

might be a century between that, but a century is just a tiny amount of time on the scales we're

Robin Hanson (1:34:22.240)

talking about. So this is, in computer science, ant colony optimization. It's true for ants.

Lex Fridman (1:34:28.400)

So it's like when the first ant shows up, it's likely if there's anything of value,

Lex Fridman (1:34:33.200)

it's likely the other ants will follow quickly. Yeah.

Robin Hanson (1:34:36.800)

Relatively short. It's also true that traveling over very long distances, probably one of the

Robin Hanson (1:34:42.800)

main ways to make that feasible is that you land somewhere, you colonize a bit, you create new

Robin Hanson (1:34:48.240)

resources that can then allow you to go farther. Many short hops as opposed to a giant long journey.

Robin Hanson (1:34:53.200)

Exactly. Those hops require that you are able to start a colonization of sorts along those hops.

Robin Hanson (1:34:59.280)

You have to be able to stop somewhere, make it into a way station such that you can then support

Robin Hanson (1:35:04.640)

you moving farther. So what do you think of, there's been a lot of UFO sightings. What do

Robin Hanson (1:35:10.880)

you think about those UFO sightings and what do you think if any of them are of extraterrestrial

Lex Fridman (1:35:19.680)

origin and we don't see giant civilizations out in the sky, how do you make sense of that then?

Robin Hanson (1:35:27.440)

I want to do some clearing of throats, which people like to do on this topic, right? They want

Robin Hanson (1:35:33.040)

to make sure you understand they're saying this and not that, right? So I would say the analysis

Robin Hanson (1:35:39.120)

needs both a prior and a likelihood. So the prior is what are the scenarios that are at all plausible

Robin Hanson (1:35:47.360)

in terms of what we know about the universe. And then the likelihood is the particular actual

Robin Hanson (1:35:52.240)

sightings, like how hard are those to explain through various means. I will establish myself

Robin Hanson (1:35:58.800)

as somewhat of an expert on the prior. I would say my studies and the things I've studied make me an

Robin Hanson (1:36:04.160)

expert and I should stand up and have an opinion on that and be able to explain it. The likelihood,

Robin Hanson (1:36:09.200)

however, is not my area of expertise. That is, I'm not a pilot. I don't do atmospheric studies of

Robin Hanson (1:36:15.840)

studies of things I haven't studied in detail, the various kinds of atmospheric phenomena or

Robin Hanson (1:36:20.240)

whatever that might be used to explain the particular sightings. I can just say from

Robin Hanson (1:36:24.000)

my amateur stance, the sightings look damn puzzling. They do not look easy to dismiss.

Robin Hanson (1:36:30.480)

The attempts I've seen to easily dismiss them seem to me to fail. It seems like these are

Robin Hanson (1:36:35.280)

pretty puzzling, weird stuff that deserve an expert's attention in terms of considering,

Robin Hanson (1:36:42.160)

asking what the likelihood is. So analogy I would make as a murder trial. On average, if we say,

Robin Hanson (1:36:48.400)

what's the chance any one person murdered another person as a prior probability, maybe one in a

Robin Hanson (1:36:52.960)

thousand people get murdered. Maybe each person has a thousand people around them who could

Robin Hanson (1:36:56.480)

plausibly have done it. So the prior probability of a murder is one in a million. But we allow

Robin Hanson (1:37:01.200)

murder trials because often evidence is sufficient to overcome a one in a million prior because the

Robin Hanson (1:37:07.200)

evidence is often strong enough, right? My guess, rough guess for the UFOs as aliens

Lex Fridman (1:37:13.840)

scenario, at least some of them, is the priors roughly one in a thousand,

Robin Hanson (1:37:17.760)

much higher than the usual murder trial, plenty high enough that strong physical evidence could

Robin Hanson (1:37:23.920)

put you over the top to think it's more likely than not. But I'm not an expert on that physical

Robin Hanson (1:37:28.720)

evidence. I'm going to leave that part to someone else. I'm going to say the prior is pretty high.

Robin Hanson (1:37:33.440)

This isn't a crazy scenario. So then I can elaborate on where my prior comes from.

Lex Fridman (1:37:38.000)

What scenario could make most sense of this data? My scenario to make sense has two main parts.

Robin Hanson (1:37:46.480)

First is panspermia siblings. So panspermia is the process by which life might have arrived on

Robin Hanson (1:37:55.040)

earth from elsewhere. And a plausible time for that, I mean, it would have to happen very early

Robin Hanson (1:38:00.960)

in earth's history because we see life early in history. And a plausible time could have been

Robin Hanson (1:38:05.200)

during the stellar nursery where the sun was born with many other stars in the same close proximity

Robin Hanson (1:38:12.400)

with lots of rocks flying around, able to move things from one place to another.

Robin Hanson (1:38:18.240)

If a rock with life on it from some rock with planet with life came into that stellar nursery,

Robin Hanson (1:38:24.480)

it plausibly could have seeded many planets in that stellar nursery all at the same time. They're

Robin Hanson (1:38:30.080)

all born at the same time in the same place, pretty close to each other, lots of rocks flying

Robin Hanson (1:38:33.600)

around. So a panspermia scenario would then create siblings, i.e. there would be, say, a few thousand

Robin Hanson (1:38:42.080)

other planets out there. So after the nursery forms, it drifts, it separates, they drift apart.

Lex Fridman (1:38:48.240)

And so out there in the galaxy, there would now be a bunch of other stars all formed at the same

Robin Hanson (1:38:52.560)

time. And we can actually spot them in terms of their spectrum. And they would have then started

Robin Hanson (1:38:58.480)

on the same path of life as we did with that life being seeded, but they would move at different

Robin Hanson (1:39:03.440)

rates. And most likely, most of them would never reach an advanced level before the deadline. But

Robin Hanson (1:39:11.120)

maybe one other did, and maybe it did before us. So if they did, they could know all this,

Lex Fridman (1:39:18.880)

and they could go searching for their siblings. That is, they could look in the sky for the other

Robin Hanson (1:39:22.560)

stars that match the spectrum that matches the spectrum that came from this nursery.

Robin Hanson (1:39:26.880)

They could identify their sibling stars in the galaxy, the thousand of them. And those would be

Robin Hanson (1:39:32.560)

of special interest to them because they would think, well, life might be on those. And they

Robin Hanson (1:39:38.000)

could go looking for them. Can we just, such a brilliant mathematical, philosophical, physical,

Robin Hanson (1:39:47.040)

biological idea of panspermia siblings, because we all kind of started at a similar time

Robin Hanson (1:39:53.840)

in this local pocket of the universe. And so that changes a lot of the math.

Lex Fridman (1:40:02.560)

So that would create this correlation between when advanced life might appear,

Robin Hanson (1:40:06.080)

no longer just random independent spaces and space time. There'd be this cluster, perhaps.

Lex Fridman (1:40:10.800)

And that allows interaction between non grabby alien civilizations, like kind of

Robin Hanson (1:40:19.040)

primitive alien civilizations, like us with others. And they might be a little bit ahead.

Lex Fridman (1:40:25.360)

That's so fascinating.

Robin Hanson (1:40:26.880)

They would probably be a lot ahead. So the puzzle is, if they happened before us,

Lex Fridman (1:40:33.600)

they probably happened hundreds of millions of years before us.

Lex Fridman (1:40:37.040)

But less than a billion.

Robin Hanson (1:40:38.560)

Less than a billion, but still plenty of time that they could have become grabby and filled

Robin Hanson (1:40:43.760)

the galaxy and gone beyond. So the fact is, they chose not to become grabby. That would

Lex Fridman (1:40:49.280)

have to be the interpretation. If we have panspermia siblings...

Robin Hanson (1:40:52.080)

Plenty of time to become grabby, you said. So they should be gone.

Lex Fridman (1:40:54.480)

Yes, they had plenty of time and they chose not to.

Robin Hanson (1:40:58.240)

Are we sure about this? A hundred million years is enough.

Lex Fridman (1:41:02.800)

So I told you before that I said, within 10 million years, our descendants will become

Robin Hanson (1:41:07.600)

grabby or not.

Lex Fridman (1:41:08.880)

And they'll have that choice. Okay.

Robin Hanson (1:41:10.640)

Right? And so they, clearly more than 10 million years earlier than us, so they chose not to.

Lex Fridman (1:41:16.240)

But still go on vacation, look around, just not grabby.

Robin Hanson (1:41:20.400)

If they chose not to expand, that's going to have to be a rule they set to not allow

Robin Hanson (1:41:25.040)

any part of themselves to do it. If they let any little ship fly away with the ability

Robin Hanson (1:41:31.440)

to create a colony, the game's over. Then the universe becomes grabby from their origin

Robin Hanson (1:41:38.000)

with this one colony, right? So in order to prevent their civilization being grabby,

Robin Hanson (1:41:42.240)

they have to have a rule they enforce pretty strongly that no part of them can ever try

Lex Fridman (1:41:46.640)

to do that.

Robin Hanson (1:41:46.960)

Through a global authoritarian regime or through something that's internal to them,

Lex Fridman (1:41:52.800)

meaning it's part of the nature of life that it doesn't want...

Robin Hanson (1:41:56.960)

As like a political officer in the brain or whatever.

Robin Hanson (1:41:59.920)

Yes. There's something in human nature that prevents you from what or like alien nature

Robin Hanson (1:42:08.640)

that as you get more advanced, you become lazier and lazier in terms of exploration

Lex Fridman (1:42:13.280)

and expansion.

Lex Fridman (1:42:14.480)

So I would say they would have to have enforced a rule against expanding and that rule would

Robin Hanson (1:42:20.320)

probably make them reluctant to let people leave very far. You know, any one vacation

Robin Hanson (1:42:25.680)

trip far away could risk an expansion from this vacation trip. So they would probably

Robin Hanson (1:42:29.760)

have a pretty tight lid on just allowing any travel out from their origin in order to

Robin Hanson (1:42:34.560)

enforce this rule. But then we also know, well, they would have chosen to come here.

Lex Fridman (1:42:40.640)

So clearly they made an exception from their general rule to say, okay, but an expedition

Robin Hanson (1:42:45.920)

to Earth, that should be allowed.

Lex Fridman (1:42:48.160)

It could be intentional exception or incompetent exception.

Lex Fridman (1:42:52.640)

But if incompetent, then they couldn't maintain this over 100 million years, this policy of

Robin Hanson (1:42:57.680)

not allowing any expansion. So we have to see they have successfully, they not just

Robin Hanson (1:43:01.520)

had a policy to try, they succeeded over 100 million years in preventing the expansion.

Lex Fridman (1:43:07.600)

That's a substantial competence.

Robin Hanson (1:43:09.600)

Let me think about this. So you don't think there could be a barrier in 100 million years,

Robin Hanson (1:43:14.560)

you don't think there could be a barrier to like technological barrier to becoming expansionary.

Robin Hanson (1:43:25.840)

Imagine the Europeans have tried to prevent anybody from leaving Europe to go to the new

Robin Hanson (1:43:30.240)

world. And imagine what it would have taken to make that happen over 100 million years.

Robin Hanson (1:43:36.160)

Yeah, it's impossible.

Robin Hanson (1:43:37.840)

They would have had to have very strict, you know, guards at the borders saying, no, you

Robin Hanson (1:43:43.360)

can't go.

Lex Fridman (1:43:44.000)

But just to clarify, you're not suggesting that's actually possible.

Robin Hanson (1:43:48.880)

I am suggesting it's possible.

Robin Hanson (1:43:51.200)

I don't know how you keep, in my silly human brain, maybe it's the brain that values freedom,

Lex Fridman (1:43:57.600)

but I don't know how you can keep, no matter how much force, no matter how much censorship

Robin Hanson (1:44:03.680)

or control or so on, I just don't know how you can keep people from exploring into the

Robin Hanson (1:44:10.480)

mysterious, into the unknown.

Robin Hanson (1:44:11.680)

You're thinking of people, we're talking aliens. So remember, there's a vast space

Robin Hanson (1:44:14.800)

of different possible social creatures they could have evolved from, different cultures

Robin Hanson (1:44:18.400)

they could be in, different kinds of threats. I mean, there are many things, as you talked

Robin Hanson (1:44:22.640)

about, that most of us would feel very reluctant to do.

Lex Fridman (1:44:25.680)

This isn't one of those.

Robin Hanson (1:44:26.560)

Okay, so how, if the UFO sightings represent alien visitors, how the heck are they getting

Lex Fridman (1:44:33.440)

here under the panspermia siblings?

Lex Fridman (1:44:36.320)

So panspermia siblings is one part of the scenario, which is that's where they came

Robin Hanson (1:44:40.880)

from. And from that, we can conclude they had this rule against expansion and they've

Robin Hanson (1:44:44.800)

successfully enforced that. That also creates a plausible agenda for why they would be here,

Robin Hanson (1:44:50.720)

that is to enforce that rule on us. That is, if we go out and expanding, then we have defeated

Robin Hanson (1:44:56.000)

the purpose of this rule they set up.

Lex Fridman (1:44:58.000)

Interesting.

Robin Hanson (1:44:58.800)

Right? So they would be here to convince us to not expand.

Lex Fridman (1:45:03.680)

Convince in quotes.

Robin Hanson (1:45:05.200)

Right? Through various mechanisms. So obviously, one thing we conclude is they didn't just

Robin Hanson (1:45:09.280)

destroy us. That would have been completely possible, right? So the fact that they're

Robin Hanson (1:45:13.120)

here and we are not destroyed means that they chose not to destroy us. They have some degree

Robin Hanson (1:45:18.560)

of empathy or whatever their morals are that would make them reluctant to just destroy

Robin Hanson (1:45:24.160)

us. They would rather persuade us.

Robin Hanson (1:45:26.240)

Destroy their brethren. And so they may have been, there's a difference in arrival and

Robin Hanson (1:45:31.600)

observation. They may have been observing for a very long time.

Lex Fridman (1:45:34.480)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (1:45:35.120)

And they arrive to try to, not to try, I don't think to try to ensure that we don't become

Lex Fridman (1:45:45.520)

grabby.

Robin Hanson (1:45:46.720)

Which is because we can see that they did not, they must have enforced a rule against

Robin Hanson (1:45:50.640)

that and they are therefore here to, that's a plausible interpretation why they would

Robin Hanson (1:45:55.680)

risk this expedition when they clearly don't risk very many expeditions over this long

Robin Hanson (1:45:59.520)

period to allow this one exception because otherwise, if they don't, we may become grabby.

Lex Fridman (1:46:04.720)

And they could have just destroyed us, but they didn't.

Lex Fridman (1:46:06.400)

And they're closely monitoring the technological advancing of our civilization. Like what

Robin Hanson (1:46:11.360)

nuclear weapons is one thing that, all right, cool. That might have less to do with nuclear

Robin Hanson (1:46:15.840)

weapons and more with nuclear energy. Maybe they're monitoring fusion closely. Like how

Lex Fridman (1:46:21.760)

clever are these apes getting?

Lex Fridman (1:46:23.280)

So no doubt they have a button that if we get too uppity or risky, they can push the

Robin Hanson (1:46:28.320)

button and ensure that we don't expand. But they'd rather do it some other way. So now

Robin Hanson (1:46:32.800)

that's, that explains why they're here and why they aren't out there. But there's another

Robin Hanson (1:46:36.720)

thing that we need to explain. There's another key data we need to explain about UFOs if

Robin Hanson (1:46:40.000)

we're going to have a hypothesis that explains them. And this is something many people have

Robin Hanson (1:46:43.680)

noticed, which is they had two extreme options they could have chosen and didn't chose.

Robin Hanson (1:46:50.400)

They could have either just remained completely invisible. Clearly an advanced civilization

Robin Hanson (1:46:54.720)

could have been completely invisible. There's no reason they need to fly around and be

Robin Hanson (1:46:58.000)

noticed. They could just be in orbit and in dark satellites that are completely invisible

Robin Hanson (1:47:02.240)

to us watching whatever they want to watch. That would be well within their abilities.

Robin Hanson (1:47:06.080)

That's one thing they could have done. The other thing they could do is just show up

Lex Fridman (1:47:09.360)

and land on the White House lawn, as they say, and shake hands, like make themselves

Robin Hanson (1:47:13.280)

really obvious. They could have done either of those and they didn't do either of those.

Robin Hanson (1:47:17.600)

That's the next thing you need to explain about UFOs as aliens. Why would they take

Robin Hanson (1:47:21.440)

this intermediate approach, hanging out near the edge of visibility with somewhat impressive

Lex Fridman (1:47:26.640)

mechanisms, but not walking up and introducing themselves nor just being completely invisible?

Robin Hanson (1:47:30.880)

So, okay, a lot of questions there. So one, do you think it's obvious where the White

Lex Fridman (1:47:37.360)

House is or the White House lawn?

Robin Hanson (1:47:39.760)

Obvious where there are concentrations of humans that you could go up and introduce.

Lex Fridman (1:47:42.400)

But is humans the most interesting thing about Earth?

Lex Fridman (1:47:46.000)

Yeah.

Robin Hanson (1:47:46.800)

Are you sure about this? Because...

Robin Hanson (1:47:48.640)

If they're worried about an expansion, then they would be worried about a civilization

Robin Hanson (1:47:52.960)

that could be capable of expansion. Obviously humans are the civilization on Earth that's

Lex Fridman (1:47:57.440)

by far the closest to being able to expand.

Robin Hanson (1:47:59.600)

I just don't know if aliens obviously see...obviously see humans, like the individual

Robin Hanson (1:48:10.800)

humans, like the meat vehicles, as the center of focus for observing a life on a planet.

Robin Hanson (1:48:19.520)

They're supposed to be really smart and advanced. Like, this shouldn't be that hard for them.

Lex Fridman (1:48:23.680)

But I think we're actually the dumb ones, because we think humans are the important

Robin Hanson (1:48:27.840)

things. But it could be our ideas. It could be something about our technologies.

Lex Fridman (1:48:32.640)

But that's mediated with us. It's correlated with us.

Robin Hanson (1:48:34.560)

No, we make it seem like it's mediated by us humans. But the focus for alien civilizations

Robin Hanson (1:48:43.360)

might be the AI systems or the technologies themselves. That might be the organism. Like,

Lex Fridman (1:48:49.200)

what humans are like...human is the food, the source of the organism that's under observation,

Lex Fridman (1:48:57.920)

versus like...

Lex Fridman (1:48:59.120)

So what they wanted to have close contact with was something that was closely near humans,

Robin Hanson (1:49:03.440)

then they would be contacting those. And we would just incidentally see, but we would still see.

Lex Fridman (1:49:08.080)

But don't you think that...isn't it possible, taking their perspective,

Robin Hanson (1:49:12.960)

isn't it possible that they would want to interact with some fundamental aspect that

Robin Hanson (1:49:16.960)

they're interested in without interfering with it? And that's actually a very...no

Lex Fridman (1:49:23.200)

matter how advanced you are, it's very difficult to do.

Lex Fridman (1:49:25.280)

But that's puzzling. So, I mean, the prototypical UFO observation is a shiny,

Robin Hanson (1:49:33.120)

big object in the sky that has very rapid acceleration and no apparent surfaces for

Robin Hanson (1:49:41.200)

using air to manipulate at speed. And the question is, why that? Again, if they just...

Robin Hanson (1:49:50.960)

For example, if they just wanted to talk to our computer systems, they could move some sort of

Robin Hanson (1:49:55.200)

like a little probe that connects to a wire and reads and sends bits there. They don't need a

Lex Fridman (1:50:00.720)

shiny thing flying in the sky.

Lex Fridman (1:50:02.160)

But don't you think they would be looking for the right way to communicate, the right

Robin Hanson (1:50:08.960)

language to communicate? Everything you just said, looking at the computer systems,

Robin Hanson (1:50:13.280)

I mean, that's not a trivial thing. Coming up with a signal that us humans would not freak out

Lex Fridman (1:50:20.320)

too much about, but also understand, might not be that trivial.

Robin Hanson (1:50:24.240)

Well, so the not freak out part is another interesting constraint. So again, I said,

Robin Hanson (1:50:28.320)

like the two obvious strategies are just to remain completely invisible and watch,

Robin Hanson (1:50:31.920)

which would be quite feasible, or to just directly interact, come out and be really

Robin Hanson (1:50:36.800)

very direct, right? I mean, there's big things that you can see around. There's big cities,

Robin Hanson (1:50:41.280)

there's aircraft carriers, there's lots of... If you want to just find a big thing and come

Robin Hanson (1:50:45.440)

right up to it and like tap it on the shoulder or whatever, that would be quite feasible,

Robin Hanson (1:50:49.280)

then they're not doing that. So my hypothesis is that one of the other questions there was,

Robin Hanson (1:50:57.280)

do they have a status hierarchy? And I think most animals on earth who are social animals

Robin Hanson (1:51:02.160)

who are social animals have status hierarchy, and they would reasonably presume that we have

Lex Fridman (1:51:07.040)

a status hierarchy. And...

Robin Hanson (1:51:09.840)

Take me to your leader.

Robin Hanson (1:51:11.360)

Well, I would say their strategy is to be impressive and sort of get us to see them

Lex Fridman (1:51:17.200)

at the top of our status hierarchy. That's how, for example, we domesticate dogs, right?

Robin Hanson (1:51:25.520)

We convince dogs we're the leader of their pack, right? And we domesticate many animals that way,

Lex Fridman (1:51:30.720)

but as we just swap into the top of their status hierarchy and we say,

Robin Hanson (1:51:34.800)

we're your top status animal, so you should do what we say, you should follow our lead.

Lex Fridman (1:51:39.600)

So the idea that would be, they are going to get us to do what they want by being top status.

Robin Hanson (1:51:48.480)

You know, all through history, kings and emperors, et cetera, have tried to impress their citizens

Lex Fridman (1:51:52.720)

and other people by having the bigger palace, the bigger parade, the bigger crown and

Robin Hanson (1:51:56.640)

diamonds, right? Whatever, maybe building a bigger pyramid, et cetera. It's a very well

Robin Hanson (1:52:00.880)

established trend to just be high status by being more impressive than the rest.

Robin Hanson (1:52:05.680)

To push back when there's an order of several orders of magnitude of power differential,

Robin Hanson (1:52:11.520)

asymmetry of power, I feel like that status hierarchy no longer applies. It's like memetic

Lex Fridman (1:52:16.560)

theory. It's like...

Robin Hanson (1:52:18.000)

Most emperors are several orders of magnitude more powerful than any one member of their empire.

Lex Fridman (1:52:22.960)

Let's increase that by even more. So like if I'm interacting with ants,

Robin Hanson (1:52:29.600)

I no longer feel like I need to establish my power with ants. I actually want to lower myself

Robin Hanson (1:52:38.880)

to the ants. I want to become the lowest possible ant so that they would welcome me.

Lex Fridman (1:52:44.400)

So I'm less concerned about them worshiping me. I'm more concerned about them welcoming me.

Lex Fridman (1:52:49.600)

It is important that you be nonthreatening and that you be local. So I think

Robin Hanson (1:52:52.880)

for example, if the aliens had done something really big in the sky, 100 light years away,

Robin Hanson (1:52:57.600)

that would be there, not here. And that could seem threatening. So I think their strategy to

Robin Hanson (1:53:02.800)

be the high status would have to be to be visible, but to be here and nonthreatening.

Robin Hanson (1:53:06.480)

I just don't know if it's obvious how to do that. Take your own perspective. You see a planet

Robin Hanson (1:53:14.240)

with relatively intelligent complex structures being formed, life forms. You could see this

Robin Hanson (1:53:20.640)

under in Titan or something like that, Europa. You start to see not just primitive bacterial

Robin Hanson (1:53:29.600)

life, but multicellular life. And it seems to form some very complicated cellular colonies,

Robin Hanson (1:53:36.320)

structures that they're dynamic. There's a lot of stuff going on. Some gigantic cellular automata

Robin Hanson (1:53:43.200)

type of construct. How do you make yourself known to them in an impressive fashion

Lex Fridman (1:53:52.000)

without destroying it? We know how to destroy potentially.

Robin Hanson (1:53:56.880)

Right. So if you go touch stuff, you're likely to hurt it, right? There's a good risk of hurting

Lex Fridman (1:54:02.160)

something by getting too close and touching it and interacting, right?

Robin Hanson (1:54:04.880)

Yeah, like landing on a White House lawn.

Robin Hanson (1:54:06.880)

Right. So the claim is that their current strategy of hanging out at the periphery of

Robin Hanson (1:54:12.960)

our vision and just being very clearly physically impressive with very clear physically impressive

Robin Hanson (1:54:17.600)

abilities is at least a plausible strategy they might use to impress us and convince us sort of

Robin Hanson (1:54:25.360)

we're at the top of their status hierarchy. And I would say if they came closer, not only would

Robin Hanson (1:54:30.960)

they risk hurting us in ways that they couldn't really understand, but more plausibly, they would

Robin Hanson (1:54:35.600)

reveal things about themselves we would hate. So if you look at how we treat other civilizations

Robin Hanson (1:54:40.960)

on Earth and other people, we are generally interested in foreigners and people from other

Robin Hanson (1:54:46.880)

plant lands. And we were generally interested in their varying cult customs, et cetera,

Robin Hanson (1:54:51.120)

until we find out that they do something that violates our moral norms and then we hate them.

Lex Fridman (1:54:56.720)

And these are aliens for God's sakes, right? There's just going to be something about them

Robin Hanson (1:55:01.200)

that we hate. They eat babies. Who knows what it is? Something they don't think is offensive,

Lex Fridman (1:55:05.760)

but that they think we might find. And so they would be risking a lot by revealing a lot about

Robin Hanson (1:55:11.120)

themselves. We would find something we hated. Interesting. But do you resonate at all with

Robin Hanson (1:55:16.880)

memetic theory where like, we only feel this way about things that are very close to us.

Lex Fridman (1:55:21.680)

So aliens are sufficiently different to where we'll be like, fascinated, terrified or fascinated,

Lex Fridman (1:55:26.880)

but not like. Right, but if they want to be at the top of our status hierarchy to get us to

Robin Hanson (1:55:30.800)

follow them, they can't be too distant. They have to be close enough that we would see them that

Robin Hanson (1:55:35.520)

way. But pretend to be close enough. Right. And not reveal much that mystery that old Clint Eastwood

Robin Hanson (1:55:41.840)

cowboy. I mean, we're clever enough that we can figure out their agenda. That is just from the

Robin Hanson (1:55:47.520)

fact that we're here. If we see that they're here, we can figure out, Oh, they want us not to expand

Lex Fridman (1:55:51.520)

and look, they are this huge power and they're very impressive. So, and a lot of us don't want

Robin Hanson (1:55:55.920)

to expand. So that could easily tip us over the edge toward we already wanted to not expand. We

Robin Hanson (1:56:02.000)

already wanted to be able to regulate and have a central community. And here are these very advanced

Robin Hanson (1:56:07.040)

smart aliens who have survived for a hundred million years and they're telling us not to expand

Robin Hanson (1:56:12.400)

either. This is brilliant. I love this so much. Uh, the, the, so returning to panspermia siblings,

Lex Fridman (1:56:21.360)

just to clarify one thing in that framework, how would, who originated, who planted it?

Robin Hanson (1:56:31.120)

Would it be a grabby alien civilization that planted the siblings or no? The simple scenario

Robin Hanson (1:56:36.960)

is that life started on some other planet billions of years ago and it went through part of the

Robin Hanson (1:56:44.080)

stages of evolution to advance life, but not all the way to advance life. And then some rock hit

Robin Hanson (1:56:49.440)

it, grabbed a piece of it on the rock and that rock drifted for maybe in a million years until

Robin Hanson (1:56:54.640)

it happened to prong the stellar nursery where it then seeded many stars. And something about that

Robin Hanson (1:57:00.240)

life without being super advanced, it was nevertheless resilient to the harsh conditions

Robin Hanson (1:57:05.360)

of space. There's some graphs that I've been impressed by that show sort of the level of

Robin Hanson (1:57:10.480)

genetic information in various kinds of life on the history of earth. And basically we are now

Robin Hanson (1:57:16.880)

more complex than the earlier life, but the earlier life was still pretty complex. And so if

Robin Hanson (1:57:22.000)

you actually project this log graph in history, it looks like it was many billions of years ago

Robin Hanson (1:57:27.280)

when you get down to zero. So like plausible, you could say there was just a lot of evolution that

Robin Hanson (1:57:31.520)

had to happen before you to get to the simplest life we've ever seen in history of life on earth

Robin Hanson (1:57:35.520)

was still pretty damn complicated. Okay. And so that race, that's always been this puzzle. How

Robin Hanson (1:57:40.800)

could life get to this enormously complicated level in the short period it seems to at the

Robin Hanson (1:57:46.560)

beginning of earth history. So where, you know, it's only 300 million years at most when it

Robin Hanson (1:57:52.560)

appeared. And then it was really complicated at that point. So panspermia allows you to

Robin Hanson (1:57:57.840)

explain that complexity by saying, well, it's been another 5 billion years on another planet

Robin Hanson (1:58:03.040)

going through lots of earlier stages where it was working its way up to the level of

Robin Hanson (1:58:06.720)

complexity you see at the beginning of earth. We'll try to talk about other ideas of the

Robin Hanson (1:58:12.080)

origin of life, but let me return to UFO sightings. Is there other explanations that are possible

Robin Hanson (1:58:18.480)

outside of panspermia siblings that can explain no grabby aliens in the sky and yet alien arrival

Robin Hanson (1:58:26.640)

on earth? Well, the other categories of explanations that most people will use is, well,

Robin Hanson (1:58:33.280)

first of all, just mistakes, like, you know, you're, you're, you're confusing something

Robin Hanson (1:58:37.440)

ordinary for something mysterious, right? Or some sort of secret organization, like our

Robin Hanson (1:58:43.840)

government is secretly messing with us and trying to do a, you know, a false flag ops

Robin Hanson (1:58:48.720)

or whatever, right? You know, they're trying to convince the Russians or the Chinese that

Robin Hanson (1:58:52.080)

there might be aliens and scare them into not attacking or something, right? Because

Robin Hanson (1:58:56.880)

if you, you know, the history of World War II, say the US government did all these big

Robin Hanson (1:59:00.720)

fake operations where they were faking a lot of big things in order to mess with people.

Lex Fridman (1:59:05.600)

So that's a possibility. The government has been lying and, you know, faking things and

Robin Hanson (1:59:09.680)

paying people to lie about what they saw, et cetera. That's a plausible set of explanations

Robin Hanson (1:59:16.240)

for the range of sightings seen. And another explanation people offer is some other hidden

Robin Hanson (1:59:21.440)

organization on earth or some, you know, secret organization somewhere that has much more

Robin Hanson (1:59:26.080)

advanced capabilities than anybody's given a credit for, for some reason it's been keeping

Robin Hanson (1:59:30.400)

secret. I mean, they all sound somewhat implausible, but again, we're looking for maybe,

Robin Hanson (1:59:35.040)

you know, one in a thousand sort of priors. Question is, you know, could, could they be

Robin Hanson (1:59:40.400)

in that level of plausibility? Can we just linger on this? So you, first of all, you've written,

Robin Hanson (1:59:47.360)

talked about, thought about so many different topics. You're an incredible mind. And I just

Robin Hanson (1:59:54.320)

thank you for sitting down today. I'm almost like at a loss of which place we explore,

Lex Fridman (1:59:59.520)

but let me on this topic, ask about conspiracy theories because you've written about institutions

Robin Hanson (20:06.560)

not be willing to do the thing that maybe you feel is right anyway, which is still to pay for it.

Lex Fridman (20:13.840)

And then somebody knowing that might want to keep that news from you and not tell you about

Lex Fridman (20:18.640)

the low chance of success or the high cost in order to save you this

Robin Hanson (20:22.880)

tension, this awkward moment where you might fail to do what they and you think is right.

Lex Fridman (20:30.080)

But I think the higher calling, the higher standard to hold you to, which many people

Robin Hanson (20:36.000)

can be held to, is to say, I will look at things accurately, I will know the truth,

Lex Fridman (20:41.280)

and then I will also do the right thing with it. I will be at peace with my judgment about what

Robin Hanson (20:47.360)

the right thing is in terms of the truth. I don't need to be lied to in order to figure out what the

Robin Hanson (20:52.800)

right thing to do is. And I think if you do think you need to be lied to in order to figure out

Lex Fridman (20:57.520)

what the right thing to do is, you're at a great disadvantage because then people will be lying

Robin Hanson (21:03.120)

to, you will be lying to yourself, and you won't be as effective at achieving whatever good you

Robin Hanson (21:10.080)

were trying to achieve. But getting the data, getting the facts is step one, not the final

Robin Hanson (21:15.440)

step. So I would say having a good model, getting the good data is step one, and it's a burden.

Robin Hanson (21:24.720)

Because you can't just use that data to arrive at sort of the easy convenient thing. You have

Robin Hanson (21:33.520)

to really deeply think about what is the right thing. So the dark aspect of data, of models,

Robin Hanson (21:42.720)

is you can use it to excuse away actions that aren't ethical. You can use data to basically

Robin Hanson (21:50.720)

excuse away anything. But not looking at data lets you excuse yourself to pretend and think

Robin Hanson (21:57.120)

that you're doing good when you're not. Exactly. But it is a burden. It doesn't excuse you from

Robin Hanson (22:03.920)

still being human and deeply thinking about what is right. That very kind of gray area,

Robin Hanson (22:09.360)

that very subjective area, that's part of the human condition. But let us return for a time

Robin Hanson (22:16.720)

to aliens. So you started to define sort of the model, the parameters of grabbiness.

Robin Hanson (22:26.640)

As we approach grabbiness. So what happens? So again, there was three parameters. There's the

Robin Hanson (22:32.320)

speed at which they expand, there's the rate at which they appear in time, and that rate has a

Robin Hanson (22:38.400)

constant and a power. So we've talked about the history of life on Earth suggests that power is

Robin Hanson (22:42.560)

around 6, but maybe 3 to 12. We can say that constant comes from our current date, sort of

Robin Hanson (22:48.560)

sets the overall rate. And the speed, which is the last parameter, comes from the fact that when we

Robin Hanson (22:54.320)

look in the sky, we don't see them. So the model predicts very strongly that if they were expanding

Robin Hanson (22:59.280)

slowly, say 1% of the speed of light, our sky would be full of vast spheres that were full

Robin Hanson (23:05.440)

of activity. That is, at a random time when a civilization is first appearing, if it looks out

Robin Hanson (23:11.520)

into its sky, it would see many other grabby alien civilizations in the sky, and they would be much

Robin Hanson (23:15.920)

bigger than the full moon. There'd be huge spheres in the sky, and they would be visibly different.

Robin Hanson (23:20.320)

We don't see them. Can we pause for a second? Okay. There's a bunch of hard steps that Earth had to

Robin Hanson (23:26.800)

pass to arrive at this place we are currently, which we're starting to launch rockets onto space.

Robin Hanson (23:33.040)

We're kind of starting to expand a bit, very slowly. Okay. But this is like the birth. If you

Robin Hanson (23:39.920)

look at the entirety of the history of Earth, we're now at this precipice of like expansion.

Robin Hanson (23:46.560)

We could, we might not choose to, but if we do, we will do it in the next 10 million years.

Lex Fridman (23:51.680)

10 million. Wow. Time flies when you're having fun.

Robin Hanson (23:55.440)

10 million is a short time on the cosmological scale. So that is, it might be only a thousand,

Lex Fridman (23:59.920)

but the point is if it's, even if it's up to 10 million, that hardly makes any difference to the

Robin Hanson (24:03.440)

model. So I might as well give you 10 million. This, this makes me feel, I was, I was so stressed

Robin Hanson (24:08.720)

about planning what I'm going to do today. And now you got plenty of time, plenty of time.

Robin Hanson (24:13.840)

Uh, just need to be generating some offspring quickly here. Okay. Um, so, and there's this moment

Robin Hanson (24:23.040)

this 10 million, uh, year gap, uh, or window when we start expanding and you're saying, okay,

Lex Fridman (24:29.280)

so this is an interesting moment where there's a bunch of other alien civilizations that might at

Robin Hanson (24:34.720)

some history of the universe arrived at this moment we're here, they passed all the hard steps.

Robin Hanson (24:39.520)

There's a, there's a model for how likely it is that that happens. And then they start expanding

Lex Fridman (24:45.440)

and you think of an expansion is almost like a sphere. Right. That's when you say speed,

Robin Hanson (24:50.640)

we're talking about the speed of the radius growth. Exactly. Like the surface, how fast the

Robin Hanson (24:55.440)

surface. Okay. And so you're saying that there is some speed for that expansion, average speed,

Lex Fridman (25:01.600)

and then we can play with that parameter. And if that speed is super slow, then maybe that

Robin Hanson (25:08.000)

explains why we haven't seen anything. If it's super fast, the slow would create the puzzle.

Robin Hanson (25:14.000)

It's slow predicts, we would see them, but we don't see them as a way to explain that is that

Robin Hanson (25:18.240)

they're fast. So the idea is if they're moving really fast, then we don't see them until they're

Robin Hanson (25:23.040)

almost here. Okay, this is counterintuitive. All right, hold on a second. So I think this

Robin Hanson (25:28.640)

works best when I say a bunch of dumb things. Okay. And then you elucidate the full complexity

Lex Fridman (25:37.520)

and the beauty of the dumbness. Okay. So there's these spheres out there in the universe that are

Robin Hanson (25:44.960)

made visible because they're sort of using a lot of energy. So they're generating a lot of light

Robin Hanson (25:49.760)

stuff. They're changing things. They're changing things. And change would be visible a long way

Robin Hanson (25:55.680)

off. Yes. They would take apart stars, rearrange them, restructure galaxies. They would do all

Robin Hanson (26:00.640)

kinds of big, huge stuff. Okay. If they're expanding slowly, we would see a lot of them

Robin Hanson (26:08.240)

because the universe is old, is old enough to where we would see them. That is we're assuming

Robin Hanson (26:13.200)

we're just typical, you know, maybe at the 50th percentile of them. So like half of them have

Robin Hanson (26:17.760)

appeared so far. The other half will still appear later. And the math of our best estimate is that

Robin Hanson (26:26.240)

they appear roughly once per million galaxies. And we would meet them in roughly a billion years

Lex Fridman (26:33.040)

if we expanded out to meet them. So we're looking at a grabby aliens model

Robin Hanson (26:37.840)

3D sim. That's the actual name of the video. By the time we get to 13.8 billion years, the fun

Robin Hanson (26:48.160)

begins. Okay. So this is, we're watching a three dimensional sphere rotating. I presume that's the

Robin Hanson (26:56.880)

universe. And then grabby aliens are expanding and filling that universe with all kinds of fun.

Robin Hanson (27:04.000)

Pretty soon it's all full. It's full. So that's how the grabby aliens come in contact. First of all,

Robin Hanson (27:11.600)

with other aliens and then with us humans. The following is a simulation of the grabby aliens

Robin Hanson (27:18.240)

model of alien civilizations. Civilizations are born that expand outwards at constant speed.

Robin Hanson (27:24.400)

A spherical region of space is shown. By the time we get to 13.8 billion years,

Robin Hanson (27:29.520)

this sphere will be about 3000 times as wide as the distance from the Milky Way to Andromeda.

Robin Hanson (27:36.960)

Okay. This is fun.

Lex Fridman (27:38.320)

It's huge.

Robin Hanson (27:38.960)

Okay. It's huge. All right. So why don't we see, we're one little tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny dot in

Lex Fridman (27:48.800)

that giant, giant sphere. Why don't we see any of the grabby aliens?

Robin Hanson (27:53.760)

It depends on how fast they expand. So you could see that if they expanded at the speed of light,

Robin Hanson (27:58.960)

you wouldn't see them until they were here. So like out there, if somebody is destroying the

Robin Hanson (28:03.440)

universe with a vacuum decay, there's this, there's this doomsday scenario where somebody

Robin Hanson (28:09.840)

somewhere could change the vacuum of the universe and that would expand at the speed of light and

Robin Hanson (28:14.160)

basically destroy everything it hit. But you'd never see that until I got here because it's

Robin Hanson (28:18.000)

expanding at the speed of light. If you're expanding really slow, then you see it from

Robin Hanson (28:21.840)

a long way off. So the fact we don't see anything in the sky tells us they're expanding fast,

Robin Hanson (28:26.960)

say over a third the speed of light. And that's really, really fast. But that's what you have to

Robin Hanson (28:32.720)

believe if we look out and you don't see anything. Now you might say, well, how, maybe I just don't

Robin Hanson (28:37.840)

want to believe this whole model. Why should I believe this whole model at all? And our best

Robin Hanson (28:42.400)

evidence why you should believe this model is our early date. We are right now almost 14 billion

Robin Hanson (28:49.360)

years into the universe on a planet around a star that's roughly 5 billion years old.

Lex Fridman (28:56.720)

But the average star out there will last roughly 5 trillion years. That is a thousand times longer.

Lex Fridman (29:05.120)

And remember that power law, it says that the chance of advanced life appearing on a planet

Robin Hanson (29:09.520)

goes as the power of sixth of the time. So if a planet lasts a thousand times longer,

Robin Hanson (29:14.720)

then the chance of it appearing on that planet, if everything would stay empty at least, is a

Robin Hanson (29:19.840)

thousand to the sixth power or 10 to the 18. So enormous, overwhelming chance that if the universe

Robin Hanson (29:27.520)

would just stay sit and empty and waiting for advanced life to appear, when it would appear

Robin Hanson (29:31.920)

would be way at the end of all these planet lifetimes. That is the long planets near the end

Robin Hanson (29:39.360)

of the lifetime, trillions of years into the future. So, but we're really early compared to that. And

Robin Hanson (29:44.480)

our explanation is at the moment, as you saw in the video, the universe is filling up in roughly a

Robin Hanson (29:49.120)

billion years, it'll all be full. And at that point, it's too late for advanced life to show up.

Lex Fridman (29:53.520)

So you had to show up now before that deadline. Okay. Can we break that apart a little bit? Okay.

Robin Hanson (29:59.120)

Or linger on some of the things you said. So with the power law, the things we've done on earth,

Robin Hanson (2:00:06.720)

authorities. What, this is a bit of a therapy session, but what do we make of conspiracy

Robin Hanson (2:00:18.320)

theories? The phrase itself is pushing you in a direction, right? So clearly in history,

Robin Hanson (2:00:25.120)

we've had many large coordinated keepings of secrets, right? Say the Manhattan project,

Robin Hanson (2:00:30.240)

right? And there was hundreds of thousands of people working on that over many years,

Lex Fridman (2:00:34.240)

but they kept it a secret, right? Clearly many large military operations have kept things secrets

Robin Hanson (2:00:39.600)

over, you know, even decades with many thousands of people involved. So clearly it's possible to

Robin Hanson (2:00:47.040)

keep some things secret over time periods. You know, but the more people you involve and the

Robin Hanson (2:00:53.840)

more time you are assuming and the more, the less centralized an organization or the less

Robin Hanson (2:00:59.040)

discipline they have, the harder it gets to believe. But we're just trying to calibrate

Robin Hanson (2:01:02.880)

basically in our minds, which kind of secrets can be kept by which groups over what time periods

Robin Hanson (2:01:07.600)

for what purposes, right? But let me, I don't have enough data. So I'm somebody, I, you know,

Robin Hanson (2:01:14.960)

I hang out with people and I love people. I love all things really. And I just, I think that most

Robin Hanson (2:01:22.400)

people, even the assholes have the capacity to be good and they're beautiful and I enjoy them.

Lex Fridman (2:01:28.400)

So the kind of data, my brain, whatever the chemistry of my brain is that sees the beautiful

Robin Hanson (2:01:33.200)

in things is maybe collecting a subset of data that doesn't allow me to intuit the competence

Robin Hanson (2:01:42.320)

that humans are able to achieve in constructing a conspiracy theory. So for example, one thing

Robin Hanson (2:01:50.800)

that people often talk about is like intelligence agencies, this like broad thing. They say the CIA,

Robin Hanson (2:01:55.920)

the FSB, the different, the British intelligence. I've fortunate or unfortunate enough, never gotten

Robin Hanson (2:02:02.720)

the chance that I know of to talk to any member of those intelligence agencies nor like take a

Robin Hanson (2:02:11.760)

peek behind the curtain or the first curtain. I don't know how many levels of curtains there are.

Lex Fridman (2:02:16.480)

And so I don't, I can't intuit my interactions with government. I was funded by DOD and DARPA

Lex Fridman (2:02:22.800)

and I've interacted, been to the Pentagon, like with all due respect to my friends, lovely friends

Robin Hanson (2:02:31.440)

in government. And there are a lot of incredible people, but there is a very giant bureaucracy

Robin Hanson (2:02:36.960)

that sometimes suffocates the ingenuity of the human spirit is one way I can put it. Meaning

Robin Hanson (2:02:43.440)

they are, I just, it's difficult for me to imagine extreme competence at a scale of hundreds or

Robin Hanson (2:02:50.240)

thousands human beings. Now that doesn't mean that's my very anecdotal data of the situation.

Lex Fridman (2:02:56.240)

And so I try to build up my intuition about centralized system of government, how much

Robin Hanson (2:03:05.600)

conspiracy is possible, how much the intelligence agencies or some other source can generate

Robin Hanson (2:03:14.000)

sufficiently robust propaganda that controls the populace. If you look at World War II, as you

Robin Hanson (2:03:20.720)

mentioned, there've been extremely powerful propaganda machines on the Nazi, on the side of

Robin Hanson (2:03:26.960)

Nazi Germany, on the side of the Soviet Union, on the side of the United States and all these different

Robin Hanson (2:03:33.120)

mechanisms. Sometimes they control the free press through social pressures. Sometimes they control

Robin Hanson (2:03:40.560)

the press through the threat of violence, as you do in authoritarian regimes. Sometimes it's like

Robin Hanson (2:03:47.520)

deliberately the dictator, like writing the news, the headlines and literally announcing it. And

Robin Hanson (2:03:53.600)

something about human psychology forces you to embrace the narrative and believe the narrative.

Lex Fridman (2:04:02.560)

And at scale that becomes reality when the initial spark was just the propaganda thought in a single

Robin Hanson (2:04:09.520)

individual's mind. So I can't necessarily intuit of what's possible, but I'm skeptical of the power

Robin Hanson (2:04:19.680)

of human institutions to construct conspiracy theories that cause suffering at scale, especially

Robin Hanson (2:04:26.800)

in this modern age when information is becoming more and more accessible by the populace. Anyway,

Lex Fridman (2:04:32.160)

that's the, I don't know if you can elucidate for us.

Robin Hanson (2:04:35.120)

It's called suffering at scale, but of course, say during wartime, the people who are managing

Robin Hanson (2:04:39.520)

the various conspiracies like D Day or Manhattan Project, they thought that their conspiracy was

Robin Hanson (2:04:45.040)

avoiding harm rather than causing harm. So if you can get a lot of people to think that supporting

Robin Hanson (2:04:49.760)

the conspiracy is helpful, then a lot more might do that. And there's just a lot of things that

Robin Hanson (2:04:57.120)

people just don't want to see. So if you can make your conspiracy the sort of thing that people

Robin Hanson (2:05:01.920)

wouldn't want to talk about anyway, even if they knew about it, you're most of the way there.

Lex Fridman (2:05:07.280)

So I have learned many over the years, many things that most ordinary people would never want to

Robin Hanson (2:05:12.640)

hear, many things that most ordinary people should be interested in, but somehow don't know,

Robin Hanson (2:05:17.200)

even though the data has been very widespread. So I have this book, The Elephant and the Brain,

Lex Fridman (2:05:21.600)

and one of the chapters is there on medicine. And basically, most people seem ignorant of the very

Robin Hanson (2:05:27.440)

basic fact that when we do randomized trials where we give some people more medicine than others,

Robin Hanson (2:05:32.480)

the people who get more medicine are not healthier. Just overall, in general, just like

Robin Hanson (2:05:38.160)

induce somebody to get more medicine because you just give them more budget to buy medicine, say.

Lex Fridman (2:05:42.160)

And not a specific medicine, just the whole category. And you would think that would be

Robin Hanson (2:05:46.960)

something most people should know about medicine. You might even think that would be a conspiracy

Robin Hanson (2:05:50.800)

theory to think that would be hidden, but in fact, most people never learn that fact.

Lex Fridman (2:05:55.760)

So just to clarify, just a general high level statement, the more medicine you take,

Lex Fridman (2:06:02.080)

the less healthy you are.

Robin Hanson (2:06:04.480)

Randomized experiments don't find that fact. Do not find that more medicine makes you more healthy.

Robin Hanson (2:06:10.080)

There's just no connection. In randomized experiments, there's no relationship between

Robin Hanson (2:06:15.520)

more medicine and being healthier.

Lex Fridman (2:06:16.400)

So it's not a negative relationship, but it's just no relationship.

Robin Hanson (2:06:19.680)

Right.

Lex Fridman (2:06:20.960)

And so the conspiracy theory would say that the businesses that sell you medicine don't want you

Robin Hanson (2:06:27.440)

to know that fact. And then you're saying that there's also part of this is that people just

Lex Fridman (2:06:32.800)

don't want to know.

Robin Hanson (2:06:33.760)

They just don't want to know. And so they don't learn this. So I've lived in the Washington area

Robin Hanson (2:06:38.560)

for several decades now, reading the Washington Post regularly. Every week there was a special

Robin Hanson (2:06:44.400)

section on health and medicine. It never was mentioned in that section of the paper

Lex Fridman (2:06:48.400)

in all the 20 years I read that.

Lex Fridman (2:06:50.560)

So do you think there is some truth to this caricatured blue pill, red pill,

Lex Fridman (2:06:55.280)

where most people don't want to know the truth?

Robin Hanson (2:06:58.720)

There are many things about which people don't want to know certain kinds of truths.

Robin Hanson (2:07:02.080)

Yeah. That is bad looking truths, truths that discouraging, truths that sort of take away the

Robin Hanson (2:07:07.520)

justification for things they feel passionate about.

Lex Fridman (2:07:10.640)

Do you think that's a bad aspect of human nature? That's something we should try to overcome?

Robin Hanson (2:07:16.880)

Well, as we discussed, my first priority is to just tell people about it, to do the analysis

Lex Fridman (2:07:22.000)

and the cold facts of what's actually happening, and then to try to be careful about how we can

Robin Hanson (2:07:26.240)

improve. So our book, The Elephant in the Rain, coauthored with Kevin Simler, is about how we

Robin Hanson (2:07:30.560)

hide motives in everyday life. And our first priority there is just to explain to you what are

Robin Hanson (2:07:35.920)

the things that you are not looking at that you have reluctant to look at. And many people try

Robin Hanson (2:07:40.880)

to take that book as a self help book where they're trying to improve themselves and make

Robin Hanson (2:07:44.560)

sure they look at more things. And that often goes badly because it's harder to actually do

Robin Hanson (2:07:49.200)

that than you think. But we at least want you to know that this truth is available if you want

Robin Hanson (2:07:55.680)

to learn about it.

Robin Hanson (2:07:56.400)

It's the Nietzsche, if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you. Let's talk about

Robin Hanson (2:08:01.520)

this elephant in the brain. Amazing book. The elephant in the room is, quote, an important

Robin Hanson (2:08:08.480)

issue that people are reluctant to acknowledge or address a social taboo. The elephant in the brain

Robin Hanson (2:08:14.080)

is an important but unacknowledged feature of how our mind works, an introspective taboo.

Robin Hanson (2:08:20.000)

You describe selfishness and self deception as the core or some of the core elephants,

Robin Hanson (2:08:28.720)

some of the elephants, elephant offspring in the brain. Selfishness and self deception.

Lex Fridman (2:08:35.680)

All right.

Lex Fridman (2:08:36.960)

Can you explain, can you explain why these are the taboos in our brain that we

Lex Fridman (2:08:45.200)

don't want to acknowledge to ourselves?

Robin Hanson (2:08:46.880)

Your conscious mind, the one that's listening to me that I'm talking to at the moment, you like

Robin Hanson (2:08:53.280)

to think of yourself as the president or king of your mind, ruling over all that you see,

Robin Hanson (2:08:58.960)

issuing commands that immediately obeyed. You are instead better understood as the press secretary

Robin Hanson (2:09:06.240)

of your brain. You don't make decisions. You justify them to an audience. That's what your

Robin Hanson (2:09:12.800)

conscious mind is for. You watch what you're doing and you try to come up with stories that explain

Lex Fridman (2:09:20.640)

what you're doing so that you can avoid accusations of violating norms. So humans compared to most

Robin Hanson (2:09:26.880)

other animals have norms, and this allows us to manage larger groups with our morals and norms

Robin Hanson (2:09:32.480)

about what we should or shouldn't be doing. This is so important to us that we needed to be

Robin Hanson (2:09:38.160)

constantly watching what we were doing in order to make sure we had a good story to avoid norm

Robin Hanson (2:09:43.440)

violations. So many norms are about motives. So if I hit you on purpose, that's a big violation.

Robin Hanson (2:09:48.480)

If I hit you accidentally, that's okay. I need to be able to explain why it was an accident

Lex Fridman (2:09:52.960)

and not on purpose.

Lex Fridman (2:09:54.880)

So where does that need come from for your own self preservation?

Robin Hanson (2:09:58.880)

Right. So humans have norms and we have the norm that if we see anybody violating a norm,

Robin Hanson (2:10:03.040)

we need to tell other people and then coordinate to make them stop and punish them for violating.

Lex Fridman (2:10:09.200)

So such benefits are strong enough and severe enough that we each want to avoid being successfully

Robin Hanson (2:10:15.360)

accused of violating norms. So for example, hitting someone on purpose is a big clear norm

Robin Hanson (2:10:21.760)

violation. If we do it consistently, we may be thrown out of the group and that would mean we

Robin Hanson (2:10:25.520)

would die. Okay. So we need to be able to convince people we are not going around hitting people on

Robin Hanson (2:10:30.960)

purpose. If somebody happens to be at the other end of our fist and their face connects, that was

Robin Hanson (2:10:37.440)

an accident and we need to be able to explain that. And similarly for many other norms humans

Robin Hanson (2:10:43.680)

have, we are serious about these norms and we don't want people to violate. We find them

Robin Hanson (2:10:48.560)

violating, we're going to accuse them. But many norms have a motive component. And so we are

Robin Hanson (2:10:53.360)

trying to explain ourselves and make sure we have a good motive story about everything we do,

Robin Hanson (2:10:58.160)

which is why we're constantly trying to explain what we're doing. And that's what your conscious

Robin Hanson (2:11:02.880)

mind is doing. It is trying to make sure you've got a good motive story for everything you're

Robin Hanson (2:11:07.280)

doing. And that's why you don't know why you really do things. What you know is what the good

Robin Hanson (2:11:12.320)

story is about why you've been doing things. And that's the self deception. And you're saying that

Robin Hanson (2:11:17.280)

there is a machine, the actual dictator is selfish. And then you're just the press secretary who's

Robin Hanson (2:11:24.000)

desperately doesn't want to get fired and is justifying all of the decisions of the dictator.

Lex Fridman (2:11:29.440)

And that's the self deception.

Robin Hanson (2:11:31.520)

Right. Now, most people actually are willing to believe that this is true in the abstract. So

Robin Hanson (2:11:36.400)

our book has been classified as psychology and it was reviewed by psychologists. And the basic

Robin Hanson (2:11:41.120)

way that psychology referees and reviewers responded is to say, this is well known. Most

Robin Hanson (2:11:46.800)

people accept that there's a fair bit of self deception.

Lex Fridman (2:11:49.040)

But they don't want to accept it about themselves.

Robin Hanson (2:11:51.120)

Well, they don't want to accept it about the particular topics that we talk about. So people

Robin Hanson (2:11:55.840)

accept the idea in the abstract that they might be self deceived or that they might not be honest

Robin Hanson (2:12:00.240)

about various things. But that hasn't penetrated into the literatures where people are explaining

Robin Hanson (2:12:05.120)

particular things like why we go to school, why we go to the doctor, why we vote, et cetera. So

Robin Hanson (2:12:10.560)

our book is mainly about 10 areas of life and explaining about in each area what our actual

Robin Hanson (2:12:16.000)

motives there are. And people who study those things have not admitted that hidden motives are

Robin Hanson (2:12:23.520)

explaining those particular areas.

Lex Fridman (2:12:25.280)

So they haven't taken the leap from theoretical psychology to actual public policy.

Robin Hanson (2:12:30.080)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (2:12:30.800)

And economics and all that kind of stuff. Well, let me just linger on this and bring up my old

Robin Hanson (2:12:38.080)

friends Zingman Freud and Carl Jung. So how vast is this landscape of the unconscious mind,

Robin Hanson (2:12:47.840)

the power and the scope of the dictator? Is it only dark there? Is it some light? Is there some

Lex Fridman (2:12:56.080)

love?

Robin Hanson (2:12:56.720)

The vast majority of what's happening in your head, you're unaware of. So in a literal sense,

Robin Hanson (2:13:02.080)

the unconscious, the aspects of your mind that you're not conscious of is the overwhelming

Robin Hanson (2:13:07.520)

majority. But that's just true in a literal engineering sense. Your mind is doing lots of

Robin Hanson (2:13:12.960)

low level things, and you just can't be consciously aware of all that low level stuff. But there's

Lex Fridman (2:13:17.040)

plenty of room there for lots of things you're not aware of.

Lex Fridman (2:13:21.120)

But can we try to shine a light at the things we're unaware of specifically? Now, again,

Robin Hanson (2:13:26.480)

staying with the philosophical psychology side for a moment, can you shine a light in the Jungian

Robin Hanson (2:13:32.080)

shadow? What's going on there? What is this machine like? What level of thoughts are happening

Robin Hanson (2:13:40.080)

there? Is it something that we can even interpret? If we somehow could visualize it, is it something

Robin Hanson (2:13:46.400)

that's human interpretable? Or is it just a kind of chaos of monitoring different systems in the

Robin Hanson (2:13:51.840)

body, making sure you're happy, making sure you're fed all those kind of basic forces that form

Lex Fridman (2:13:58.400)

abstractions on top of each other, and they're not introspective at all?

Robin Hanson (2:14:01.760)

We humans are social creatures. Plausibly being social is the main reason we have these unusually

Robin Hanson (2:14:06.800)

large brains. Therefore, most of our brain is devoted to being social. And so the things we are

Robin Hanson (2:14:13.360)

very obsessed with and constantly paying attention to are, how do I look to others? What would others

Lex Fridman (2:14:19.520)

think of me if they knew these various things they might learn about me?

Lex Fridman (2:14:23.040)

So that's close to being fundamental to what it means to be human, is caring what others think.

Robin Hanson (2:14:28.000)

Right. To be trying to present a story that would be okay for what others think. But we're very

Lex Fridman (2:14:34.160)

constantly thinking, what do other people think?

Lex Fridman (2:14:36.720)

So let me ask you this question then about you, Robin Hansen, who in many places, sometimes for

Robin Hanson (2:14:45.360)

fun, sometimes as a basic statement of principle, likes to disagree with what the majority of people

Robin Hanson (2:14:52.640)

think. So how do you explain, how are you self deceiving yourself in this task? And how are you

Robin Hanson (2:15:02.000)

being self, like, why is the dictator manipulating you inside your head to be so critical? Like,

Robin Hanson (2:15:08.960)

there's norms. Why do you want to stand out in this way? Why do you want to challenge the

Lex Fridman (2:15:14.640)

norms in this way?

Robin Hanson (2:15:15.520)

Almost by definition, I can't tell you what I'm deceiving myself about. But the more practical

Robin Hanson (2:15:20.800)

strategy that's quite feasible is to ask about what are typical things that most people deceive

Robin Hanson (2:15:25.840)

themselves about, and then to own up to those particular things.

Lex Fridman (2:15:29.280)

Sure. What's a good one?

Lex Fridman (2:15:32.000)

So for example, I can very much acknowledge that I would like to be well thought of,

Robin Hanson (2:15:38.480)

that I would be seeking attention and glory and praise from my intellectual work, and that that

Robin Hanson (2:15:47.920)

would be a major agenda driving my intellectual attempts. So if there were topics that other

Robin Hanson (2:15:55.600)

people would find less interesting, I might be less interested in those for that reason,

Robin Hanson (2:15:59.760)

for example. I might want to find topics where other people are interested, and I might want to

Robin Hanson (2:16:05.680)

go for the glory of finding a big insight rather than a small one, and maybe one that was

Robin Hanson (2:16:13.680)

especially surprising. That's also, of course, consistent with some more ideal concept of what

Robin Hanson (2:16:19.040)

an intellectual should be. But most intellectuals are relatively risk averse. They are in some

Robin Hanson (2:16:27.200)

local intellectual tradition, and they are adding to that, and they are staying conforming to the

Robin Hanson (2:16:32.400)

sort of usual assumptions and usual accepted beliefs and practices of a particular area

Lex Fridman (2:16:37.200)

so that they can be accepted in that area and treated as part of the community. But you might

Robin Hanson (2:16:45.200)

think for the purpose of the larger intellectual project of understanding the world better,

Robin Hanson (2:16:50.480)

people should be less eager to just add a little bit to some tradition, and they should be looking

Robin Hanson (2:16:55.600)

for what's neglected between the major traditions and major questions. They should be looking for

Robin Hanson (2:16:59.600)

assumptions maybe we're making that are wrong. They should be looking at things that are very

Robin Hanson (2:17:04.560)

surprising, things that you would have thought a priori unlikely that once you are convinced of it,

Robin Hanson (2:17:10.960)

you find that to be very important and a big update. So you could say that one motivation

Robin Hanson (2:17:21.120)

I might have is less motivated to be sort of comfortably accepted into some particular

Robin Hanson (2:17:26.800)

intellectual community and more willing to just go for these more fundamental long shots that should

Lex Fridman (2:17:33.440)

be very important if you could find them.

Robin Hanson (2:17:35.440)

Which would, if you can find them, would get you appreciated across a larger number of people

Robin Hanson (2:17:45.280)

across the longer time span of history. So like maybe the small local community will say,

Robin Hanson (2:17:52.640)

you suck, you must conform. But the larger community will see the brilliance of you

Robin Hanson (2:18:00.000)

breaking out of the cage of the small conformity into a larger cage. There's always a bigger cage

Lex Fridman (2:18:06.960)

and then you'll be remembered by more. Yeah. Also that explains your choice of colorful shirt that

Lex Fridman (2:18:13.840)

looks great in a black background. So you definitely stand out.

Robin Hanson (2:18:17.120)

Right. Now, of course, you could say, well, you could get all this attention by making false

Robin Hanson (2:18:22.880)

claims of dramatic improvement. And then wouldn't that be much easier than actually working through

Lex Fridman (2:18:28.880)

all the details to make true claims?

Lex Fridman (2:18:30.720)

Why not? Let me ask the press secretary. Why not? So of course you spoke several times about how

Robin Hanson (2:18:37.360)

much you value truth and the pursuit of truth. That's a very nice narrative. Hitler and Stalin

Robin Hanson (2:18:43.520)

also talked about the value of truth. Do you worry when you introspect as broadly as all humans

Robin Hanson (2:18:51.040)

might that it becomes a drug, this being a martyr, being the person who points out that the emperor

Robin Hanson (2:19:03.360)

wears no clothes, even when the emperor is obviously dressed, just to be the person who points

Lex Fridman (2:19:11.040)

out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Do you think about that?

Lex Fridman (2:19:14.560)

So I think the standards you hold yourself to are dependent on the audience you have in mind.

Lex Fridman (2:19:23.280)

So if you think of your audience as relatively easily fooled or relatively gullible, then you

Robin Hanson (2:19:29.680)

won't bother to generate more complicated, deep, you know, arguments and structures and evidence

Robin Hanson (2:19:36.160)

to persuade somebody who has higher standards because why bother? You don't have to worry

Robin Hanson (2:19:42.960)

about it. Why bother? You can get away with something much easier. And of course, if you are,

Robin Hanson (2:19:47.440)

say, a salesperson, you know, you make money on sales, then you don't need to convince the top few

Robin Hanson (2:19:53.520)

percent of the most sharp customers. You can just go for the bottom 60 percent of the most gullible

Robin Hanson (2:19:58.560)

customers and make plenty of sales, right? So I think intellectuals have to vary. One of the main

Robin Hanson (2:20:06.160)

ways intellectuals vary is in who is their audience in their mind? Who are they trying to

Robin Hanson (2:20:09.840)

impress? Is it the people down the hall? Is it the people who are reading their Twitter feed? Is it

Lex Fridman (2:20:15.680)

their parents? Is it their high school teacher? Or is it Einstein and Freud and Socrates, right?

Lex Fridman (2:20:24.800)

So I think those of us who are especially arrogant, especially think that we're really

Robin Hanson (2:20:31.040)

big shot or have a chance at being a really big shot, we were naturally going to pick the

Robin Hanson (2:20:34.960)

big shot audience that we can. We're going to be trying to impress Socrates and Einstein.

Lex Fridman (2:20:39.360)

Is that why you hang out with Tyler Cohen a lot and try to convince him yourself?

Lex Fridman (2:20:44.400)

And you might think, you know, from the point of view of just making money or having sex or

Robin Hanson (2:20:48.320)

other sorts of things, this is misdirected energy, right? Trying to impress the very

Robin Hanson (2:20:54.000)

most highest quality minds. That's such a small sample and they can't do that much for you anyway.

Lex Fridman (2:20:59.360)

Yeah. So I might well have had more, you know, ordinary success in life,

Robin Hanson (2:21:04.640)

be more popular, invited to more parties, make more money if I had targeted a lower tier

Robin Hanson (2:21:11.440)

set of intellectuals with the standards they have. But for some reason I decided early on

Robin Hanson (2:21:17.040)

that Einstein was my audience or people like him and I was going to impress them.

Lex Fridman (2:21:23.200)

Yeah. I mean, you pick your set of motivations, you know, convincing,

Robin Hanson (2:21:27.600)

impressing Tyler Cohen is not going to help you get laid. Trust me, I tried. All right.

Lex Fridman (2:21:34.720)

What are some notable sort of effects of the elephant in the brain in everyday life? So you

Robin Hanson (2:21:43.760)

mentioned when we try to apply that to economics, to public policy. So when we think about medicine,

Lex Fridman (2:21:50.320)

education, all those kinds of things, what are some things that we're...

Robin Hanson (2:21:53.280)

The key thing is medicine is much less useful health wise than you think. So, you know,

Robin Hanson (2:21:59.280)

if you were focused on your health, you would care a lot less about it. And if you were focused

Robin Hanson (2:22:04.000)

on other people's health, you would also care a lot less about it. But if medicine is, as we

Robin Hanson (2:22:08.880)

suggest, more about showing that you care and let other people showing that they care about you,

Robin Hanson (2:22:13.120)

then a lot of priority on medicine can make sense. So that was our very earliest discussion

Robin Hanson (2:22:18.400)

in the podcast. You were talking about what, you know, should you give people a lot of medicine

Robin Hanson (2:22:22.640)

when it's not very effective? And then the answer then is, well, if that's the way that you show

Robin Hanson (2:22:27.360)

that you care about them and you really want them to know you care, then maybe that's what

Robin Hanson (2:22:32.080)

you need to do if you can't find a cheaper, more effective substitute. So if we actually just pause

Robin Hanson (2:22:37.280)

on that for a little bit, how do we start to untangle the full set of self deception happening

Robin Hanson (2:22:44.720)

in the space of medicine? So we have a method that we use in our book that is what I recommend

Robin Hanson (2:22:49.840)

for people to use in all these sorts of topics. The straightforward method is first, don't look

Robin Hanson (2:22:54.480)

at yourself. Look at other people, look at broad patterns of behavior and other people, and then

Robin Hanson (2:23:00.800)

ask, what are the various theories we could have to explain these patterns of behavior? And then

Robin Hanson (2:23:05.920)

just do the simple matching, which theory better matches the behavior they have. And the last step

Robin Hanson (2:23:11.680)

is to assume that's true of you too. Don't assume you're an exception. If you happen to be an

Robin Hanson (2:23:17.680)

exception, that won't go so well, but nevertheless, on average, you aren't very well positioned to

Robin Hanson (2:23:22.160)

judge if you're an exception. So look at what other people do, explain what other people do,

Lex Fridman (2:23:27.280)

and assume that's you too. But also in the case of medicine, there's several parties to consider.

Lex Fridman (2:23:34.320)

So there's the individual person that's receiving the medicine. There's the doctors that are

Robin Hanson (2:23:38.400)

prescribing the medicine. There's drug companies that are selling drugs. There are governments that

Robin Hanson (2:23:45.200)

have regulations that are lobbyists. So you can build up a network of categories of humans in this

Lex Fridman (2:23:51.760)

and they each play their role. So how do you introspect the sort of analyze the system at a

Robin Hanson (2:24:00.400)

system scale versus at the individual scale? So it turns out that in general, it's usually much

Robin Hanson (2:24:07.040)

easier to explain producer behavior than consumer behavior. That is, the drug companies or the

Robin Hanson (2:24:13.200)

doctors have relatively clear incentives to give the customers whatever they want. And so many say

Robin Hanson (2:24:20.320)

governments in democratic countries have the incentive to give the voters what they want.

Lex Fridman (2:24:24.880)

So that focuses your attention on the patient and the voter in this equation and saying,

Lex Fridman (2:24:31.760)

what do they want? They would be driving the rest of the system.

Robin Hanson (2:24:35.920)

Whatever they want, the other parties are willing to give them in order to get paid. So now we're

Robin Hanson (2:24:42.240)

looking for puzzles in patient and voter behavior. What are they choosing? And why do they choose

Robin Hanson (2:24:48.720)

that? And how much exactly? And then we can explain that potentially again, returning to

Robin Hanson (2:24:55.120)

the producer, but the producer being incentivized to manipulate the decision making processes of

Robin Hanson (2:25:00.640)

the voter and the consumer. Now, in almost every industry, producers are in general happy to lie

Lex Fridman (2:25:07.200)

and exaggerate in order to get more customers. This is true of auto repair as much as human

Robin Hanson (2:25:11.760)

body repair and medicine. So the differences between these industries can't be explained

Robin Hanson (2:25:16.400)

by the willingness of the producers to give customers what they want or to do various things

Robin Hanson (2:25:20.960)

that we have to again, go to the customers. Why are customers treating body repair different

Robin Hanson (2:25:26.560)

than auto repair? Yeah, and that potentially requires a lot of thinking, a lot of data

Robin Hanson (2:25:35.120)

collection and potentially looking at historical data too, because things don't just happen

Robin Hanson (2:25:39.520)

overnight. Over time, there's trends. In principle it does, but actually it's a lot,

Robin Hanson (2:25:43.440)

actually easier than you might think. I think the biggest limitation is just the willingness

Robin Hanson (2:25:47.840)

to consider alternative hypotheses. So many of the patterns that you need to rely on are actually

Robin Hanson (2:25:53.200)

pretty obvious, simple patterns. You just have to notice them and ask yourself, how can I explain

Robin Hanson (2:25:58.080)

those? Often you don't need to look at the most subtle, most difficult statistical evidence that

Robin Hanson (2:26:04.400)

might be out there. The simplest patterns are often enough. All right. So there's a fundamental

Robin Hanson (2:26:10.240)

statement about self deception in the book. There's the application of that, like we just did

Robin Hanson (2:26:14.640)

in medicine. Can you steel man the argument that many of the foundational ideas in the book are

Robin Hanson (2:26:22.640)

wrong? Meaning there's two that you just made, which is it can be a lot simpler than it looks.

Lex Fridman (2:26:31.920)

Can you steel man the case that it's, case by case, it's always super complicated. Like it's

Robin Hanson (2:26:38.080)

a complex system. It's very difficult to have a simple model about. It's very difficult to

Robin Hanson (2:26:42.320)

introspect. And the other one is that the human brain isn't, not just about self deception. That

Robin Hanson (2:26:50.960)

there's a lot of, there's a lot of motivations at play and we are able to really introspect our own

Robin Hanson (2:26:57.680)

mind. And like what, what's on the surface of the conscious is actually quite a good representation

Robin Hanson (2:27:03.360)

of what's going on in the brain. And you're not deceiving yourself. You're able to actually

Robin Hanson (2:27:07.920)

arrive to deeply think about where your mind stands and what you think about the world. And

Robin Hanson (2:27:13.040)

it's less about impressing people and more about being a free thinking individual.

Lex Fridman (2:27:18.240)

So when a child tries to explain why they don't have their homework assignment, they are sometimes

Robin Hanson (2:27:26.240)

inclined to say, the dog ate my homework. They almost never say the dragon ate my homework.

Robin Hanson (2:27:32.960)

The reason is the dragon is a completely implausible explanation. Almost always when we

Robin Hanson (2:27:38.880)

make excuses for things, we choose things that are at least in some degree plausible. It could

Robin Hanson (2:27:44.640)

perhaps have happened. That's an obstacle for any explanation of a hidden motive or a hidden

Robin Hanson (2:27:51.840)

feature of human behavior. If people are pretending one thing while really doing another,

Robin Hanson (2:27:57.280)

they're usually going to pick as a pretense something that's somewhat plausible. That's

Robin Hanson (2:28:02.240)

going to be an obstacle to proving that hypothesis if you are focused on sort of the local data that

Robin Hanson (2:28:09.280)

a person would typically have if they were challenged. So if you're just looking at one

Robin Hanson (2:28:12.960)

kid and his lack of homework, maybe you can't tell whether his dog ate his homework or not.

Robin Hanson (2:28:18.560)

If you happen to know he doesn't have a dog, you might have more confidence. You will need to have

Robin Hanson (2:28:24.240)

a wider range of evidence than a typical person would when they're encountering that actual excuse

Robin Hanson (2:28:29.200)

in order to see past the excuse. That will just be a general feature of it. So if I say,

Robin Hanson (2:28:36.560)

there's this usual story about where we go to the doctor and then there's this other explanation,

Robin Hanson (2:28:41.280)

it'll be true that you'll have to look at wider data in order to see that because people don't

Robin Hanson (2:28:47.600)

usually offer excuses unless in the local context of their excuse, they can get away with it. That

Robin Hanson (2:28:53.040)

is, it's hard to tell, right? So in the case of medicine, I have to point you to sort of larger

Robin Hanson (2:28:58.960)

sets of data. But in many areas of academia, including health economics, the researchers there

Robin Hanson (2:29:07.040)

also want to support the usual points of view. And so they will have selection effects in their

Robin Hanson (2:29:13.360)

publications and their analysis whereby they, if they're getting a result too much contrary to the

Robin Hanson (2:29:18.320)

usual point of view everybody wants to have, they will file drawer that paper or redo the analysis

Robin Hanson (2:29:24.080)

until they get an answer that's more to people's liking. So that means in the health economics

Robin Hanson (2:29:29.760)

literature, there are plenty of people who will claim that in fact, we have evidence that medicine

Robin Hanson (2:29:34.800)

is effective. And when I respond, I will have to point you to our most reliable evidence.

Lex Fridman (2:29:41.200)

And ask you to consider the possibility that the literature is biased in that when the evidence

Robin Hanson (2:29:46.640)

isn't as reliable, when they have more degrees of freedom in order to get the answer they want,

Robin Hanson (2:29:50.560)

they do tend to get the answer they want. But when we get to the kind of evidence that's much

Robin Hanson (2:29:55.040)

harder to mess with, that's where we will see the truth be more revealed. So with respect to

Robin Hanson (2:30:01.440)

medicine, we have millions of papers published in medicine over the years, most of which give the

Robin Hanson (2:30:07.600)

impression that medicine is useful. There's a small literature on randomized experiments of the

Robin Hanson (2:30:14.400)

aggregate effects of medicine, where there's maybe a few half dozen or so papers, where it would be

Robin Hanson (2:30:21.840)

the hardest to hide it because it's such a straightforward experiment done in a straightforward

Lex Fridman (2:30:28.320)

way that it's hard to manipulate. And that's where I will point you to.

Robin Hanson (2:30:34.880)

Manipulate. And that's where I will point you to, to show you that there's relatively

Robin Hanson (2:30:39.200)

little correlation between health and medicine. But even then, people could try to save the

Robin Hanson (2:30:43.840)

phenomenon and say, well, it's not hidden motives. It's just ignorance. They could say,

Robin Hanson (2:30:47.040)

for example, you know, medicine's complicated. Most people don't know the literature.

Robin Hanson (2:30:53.200)

Therefore, they can be excused for ignorance. They are just ignorantly assuming that medicine

Robin Hanson (2:30:59.040)

is effective. It's not that they have some other motive that they're trying to achieve.

Lex Fridman (2:31:02.400)

And then I will have to do, you know, as with a conspiracy theory analysis, I'm saying, well,

Robin Hanson (2:31:07.200)

like, how long has this misperception been going on? How consistently has it happened

Robin Hanson (2:31:12.320)

around the world and across time? And I would have to say, look, you know, if we're talking about,

Robin Hanson (2:31:18.000)

say, a recent new product, like Segway scooters or something, I could say not so many people have

Robin Hanson (2:31:24.800)

seen them or used them. Maybe they could be confused about their value. If we're talking

Robin Hanson (2:31:28.400)

about a product that's been around for thousands of years, used in roughly the same way all across

Robin Hanson (2:31:32.800)

the world, and we see the same pattern over and over again, this sort of ignorance mistake just

Robin Hanson (2:31:38.560)

doesn't work so well. It also is a question of how much of the self deception is prevalent versus

Robin Hanson (2:31:47.040)

foundational. Because there's a kind of implied thing where it's foundational to human nature

Robin Hanson (2:31:52.800)

versus just a common pitfall. This is a question I have. So, like, maybe human progress is made by

Robin Hanson (2:32:01.520)

people who don't fall into the self deception. It's a baser aspect of human nature, but then

Lex Fridman (2:32:08.960)

you escape it easily if you're motivated.

Robin Hanson (2:32:12.640)

The motivational hypotheses about the self deceptions are in terms of how it makes you

Robin Hanson (2:32:17.920)

look to the people around you. Again, the press secretary. So, the story would be, most people

Robin Hanson (2:32:23.520)

want to look good to the people around them. Therefore, most people present themselves in ways

Robin Hanson (2:32:28.640)

that help them look good to the people around them. That's sufficient to say there would be a

Robin Hanson (2:32:35.040)

lot of it. It doesn't need to be 100%, right? There's enough variety in people and in

Robin Hanson (2:32:40.160)

circumstances that sometimes taking a contrarian strategy can be in the interest of some minority

Robin Hanson (2:32:44.960)

of the people. So, I might, for example, say that that's a strategy I've taken. I've decided that

Robin Hanson (2:32:52.560)

being contrarian on these things could be winning for me in that there's a room for a small number

Robin Hanson (2:32:58.880)

of people like me who have these sort of messages who can then get more attention, even if there's

Lex Fridman (2:33:04.640)

not room for most people to do that. And that can be explaining sort of the variety, right?

Robin Hanson (2:33:11.200)

Similarly, you might say, look, just look at the most obvious things. Most people would like to

Robin Hanson (2:33:15.440)

look good, right? In the sense of physically, just you look good right now. You're wearing a nice

Robin Hanson (2:33:18.960)

suit, you have a haircut, you shaved, right? So, and we cut my own hair by the way. Okay.

Lex Fridman (2:33:23.600)

Well, that's all the more impressive. That's a counter argument for your claim.

Robin Hanson (2:33:29.120)

So, clearly, if we look at most people and their physical appearance, clearly, most people are

Robin Hanson (2:33:33.520)

trying to look somewhat nice, right? They shower, they shave, they comb their hair,

Lex Fridman (2:33:38.000)

but we certainly see some people around who are not trying to look so nice, right? Is that a

Robin Hanson (2:33:42.240)

big challenge, the hypothesis that people want to look nice? Not that much, right? We can see

Robin Hanson (2:33:48.000)

in those particular people's context, more particular reasons why they've chosen to be

Lex Fridman (2:33:53.040)

an exception to the more general rule.

Robin Hanson (2:33:55.600)

So, the general rule does reveal something foundational generally.

Lex Fridman (2:34:00.800)

Right.

Robin Hanson (2:34:01.280)

That's the way things work. Let me ask you, you wrote a blog post about the general rule,

Robin Hanson (2:34:05.840)

let me ask you, you wrote a blog post about the accuracy of authorities since we're talking

Robin Hanson (2:34:10.480)

about this, especially in medicine. Just looking around us, especially during this time of the

Robin Hanson (2:34:17.840)

pandemic, there's been a growing distrust of authorities, of institutions, even the institution

Robin Hanson (2:34:24.960)

of science itself. What are the pros and cons of authorities, would you say? So, what's nice

Lex Fridman (2:34:33.920)

about authorities? What's nice about institutions? And what are their pitfalls?

Robin Hanson (2:34:40.640)

One standard function of authority is as something you can defer to, respectively,

Robin Hanson (2:34:45.760)

without needing to seem too submissive or ignorant or, you know, gullible. That is,

Robin Hanson (2:34:56.560)

you know, when you're asking what should I act on or what beliefs should I act on,

Robin Hanson (2:35:02.080)

you might be worried if I chose something too contrarian, too weird, too speculative,

Robin Hanson (2:35:07.920)

that that would make me look bad. So, I would just choose something very conservative.

Robin Hanson (2:35:13.680)

So, maybe an authority lets you choose something a little less conservative because the authority

Robin Hanson (2:35:19.200)

is your authorization. The authority will let you do it. And you can say, and somebody says,

Lex Fridman (2:35:23.840)

why did you do that thing? And they say, the authority authorized it. The authority tells me,

Lex Fridman (2:35:28.160)

I should do this. Why aren't you doing it, right?

Lex Fridman (2:35:30.800)

So, the authority is often pushing for the conservative?

Robin Hanson (2:35:34.400)

Well, no, the authority can do more. I mean, so for example, we just think about,

Robin Hanson (2:35:38.800)

I don't know, in a pandemic even, right? You could just think, I'll just stay home and close

Robin Hanson (2:35:43.200)

all the doors or I'll just ignore it, right? You could just think of just some very simple

Robin Hanson (2:35:46.320)

strategy that might be defensible if there were no authorities, right? But authorities might be

Robin Hanson (2:35:51.920)

able to know more than that. They might be able to like look at some evidence, draw a more context

Robin Hanson (2:35:57.120)

dependent conclusion, declare it as the authority's opinion. And then other people might follow that

Lex Fridman (2:36:01.600)

and that could be better than doing nothing. So, what you mentioned, WHO, the world's most

Robin Hanson (2:36:06.960)

beloved organization. So, this is me speaking in general, WHO and CDC has been kind of,

Robin Hanson (2:36:16.720)

I, depending on degrees and details, just not behaving as I would have imagined in the best

Robin Hanson (2:36:29.280)

possible evolution of human civilization, authorities should act. They seem to have failed

Robin Hanson (2:36:35.280)

in some fundamental way in terms of leadership in a difficult time for our society. Can you say what

Robin Hanson (2:36:42.000)

are the pros and cons of this particular authority? So, again, if there were no authorities whatsoever,

Robin Hanson (2:36:49.040)

no accepted authorities, then people would sort of have to sort of randomly pick different local

Robin Hanson (2:36:55.760)

authorities who would conflict with each other. And then they'd be fighting each other about that,

Robin Hanson (2:36:59.280)

or just not believe anybody and just do some initial default action that you would always do

Robin Hanson (2:37:03.840)

without responding to context. So, the potential gain of an authority is that they could know more

Robin Hanson (2:37:09.680)

than just basic ignorance. And if people followed them, they could both be more informed than

Robin Hanson (2:37:15.760)

ignorance and all doing the same thing. So, they're each protected from being accused or

Lex Fridman (2:37:20.240)

complained about. That's the idea of an authority. That would be the good. What's the con of that?

Robin Hanson (2:37:26.640)

Okay. How does that go wrong? So, the con is that if you think of yourself as the authority and

Robin Hanson (2:37:32.880)

asking what's my best strategy as an authority, it's unfortunately not to be maximally informative.

Robin Hanson (2:37:40.160)

So, you might think the ideal authority would not just tell you more than ignorance, it would tell

Robin Hanson (2:37:45.040)

you as much as possible. Okay. It would give you as much detail as you could possibly listen to and

Robin Hanson (2:37:51.680)

manage to assimilate. And it would update that as frequently as possible or as frequently as you

Robin Hanson (2:37:57.120)

were able to listen and assimilate. And that would be the maximally informative authority. The problem

Robin Hanson (2:38:03.440)

is there's a conflict between being an authority or being seen as an authority and being maximally

Robin Hanson (2:38:10.160)

informative. That was the point of my blog post that you're pointing out to here. That is, if you

Robin Hanson (2:38:16.400)

look at it from their point of view, they won't long remain the perceived authority if they are

Robin Hanson (2:38:23.440)

too cautious, incautious about how they use that authority. And one of the ways to be incautious

Robin Hanson (2:38:31.200)

would be to be too informative. Okay. That's still in the pro column for me because you're talking

Robin Hanson (2:38:37.440)

about the tensions that are very data driven and very honest. And I would hope that authorities

Robin Hanson (2:38:44.320)

struggle with that. How much information to provide to people to maximize outcomes.

Robin Hanson (2:38:52.880)

Now I'm generally somebody that believes more information is better because I trust the

Robin Hanson (2:38:57.040)

intelligence of people. But I'd like to mention a bigger con on authorities, which is the human

Robin Hanson (2:39:03.760)

question. This comes back to a global government and so on. Is that, you know, there's humans that

Robin Hanson (2:39:11.920)

sit in chairs during meetings and those authorities, they have different titles. It's

Robin Hanson (2:39:16.080)

for humans form hierarchies. And sometimes those titles get to your head a little bit

Lex Fridman (2:39:20.320)

and you start to want to think, how do I preserve my control over this authority? As opposed to

Robin Hanson (2:39:26.480)

thinking through like, what is the mission of the authority? What is the mission of WHO and

Robin Hanson (2:39:32.160)

the other such organization? And how do I maximize the implementation of that mission? You start to

Robin Hanson (2:39:37.680)

think, well, I kind of like sitting in this big chair at the head of the table. I'd like to sit

Robin Hanson (2:39:43.120)

there for another few years or better yet, I want to be remembered as the person who in a time of

Robin Hanson (2:39:48.960)

crisis was at the head of this authority and did a lot of good things. So you stop trying to do good

Robin Hanson (2:39:58.160)

under what good means given the mission of the authority. And you start to try to carve a

Robin Hanson (2:40:03.760)

narrative, to manipulate the narrative. First in the meeting room, everybody around you, just a

Robin Hanson (2:40:09.520)

small little story you tell yourself, the new interns, the managers throughout the whole

Robin Hanson (2:40:15.520)

hierarchy of the company. Okay, once everybody in the company or in the organization believes this

Robin Hanson (2:40:20.720)

narrative, now you start to control the release of information, not because you're trying to

Robin Hanson (2:40:28.160)

maximize outcomes, but because you're trying to maximize the effectiveness of the narrative that

Robin Hanson (2:40:33.680)

you are truly a great representative of this authority in human history. And I just feel like

Robin Hanson (2:40:40.240)

those human forces whenever you have an authority, it starts getting to people's heads. One of the

Robin Hanson (2:40:47.920)

most, me as a scientist, one of the most disappointing things to see during the pandemic

Robin Hanson (2:40:53.440)

is the use of authority from colleagues of mine to roll their eyes, to dismiss other human beings

Robin Hanson (2:41:04.240)

just because they got a PhD, just because they're an assistant, associate, full faculty, just because

Robin Hanson (2:41:12.960)

they are deputy head of X organization, NIH, whatever the heck the organization is,

Robin Hanson (2:41:20.640)

just because they got an award of some kind and at a conference they won a best paper award seven

Robin Hanson (2:41:27.120)

years ago and then somebody shook their hand and gave them a medal, maybe it was a president

Lex Fridman (2:41:32.560)

and it's been 20, 30 years that people have been patting them on the back saying how special

Robin Hanson (2:41:37.920)

they are, especially when they're controlling money and getting sucked up to from other scientists

Robin Hanson (2:41:43.920)

who really want the money in a self deception kind of way, they don't actually really care

Robin Hanson (2:41:47.680)

about your performance and all of that gets to your head and no longer are you the authority

Robin Hanson (2:41:52.560)

that's trying to do good and lessen the suffering in the world, you become an authority that just

Robin Hanson (2:41:57.760)

wants to maximize, self preserve yourself in a sitting on a throne of power. So this is core to

Robin Hanson (2:42:06.800)

sort of what it is to be an economist. I'm a professor of economics. There you go with the

Robin Hanson (2:42:12.480)

authority again. No, it's about saying, we often have a situation where we see a world of behavior

Lex Fridman (2:42:20.640)

and then we see ways in which particular behaviors are not sort of maximally socially useful.

Robin Hanson (2:42:26.160)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (2:42:28.000)

And we have a variety of reactions to that. So one kind of reaction is to sort of morally

Robin Hanson (2:42:34.160)

blame each individual for not doing the maximally socially useful thing under perhaps the idea that

Robin Hanson (2:42:42.000)

people could be identified and shamed for that and maybe induced into doing the better thing if

Robin Hanson (2:42:46.720)

only enough people were calling them out on it, right? But another way to think about it is to

Robin Hanson (2:42:52.560)

think that people sit in institutions with certain stable institutional structures and that

Robin Hanson (2:42:58.400)

institutions create particular incentives for individuals and that individuals are typically

Lex Fridman (2:43:04.240)

doing whatever is in their local interest in the context of that institution.

Lex Fridman (2:43:10.000)

And then perhaps to less blame individuals for winning their local institutional game

Lex Fridman (2:43:15.840)

and more blaming the world for having the wrong institutions. So economists are often like

Robin Hanson (2:43:20.800)

wondering what other institutions we could have instead of the ones we have and which of them

Robin Hanson (2:43:24.800)

might promote better behavior. And this is a common thing we do all across human behavior is

Robin Hanson (2:43:29.680)

to think of what are the institutions we're in and what are the alternative variations we could

Robin Hanson (2:43:33.920)

imagine and then to say which institutions would be most productive. I would agree with you that

Robin Hanson (2:43:40.320)

our information institutions, that is the institutions by which we collect information

Lex Fridman (2:43:44.880)

and aggregate it and share it with people are especially broken in the sense of far from the

Robin Hanson (2:43:51.200)

ideal of what would be the most cost effective way to collect and share information. But then

Robin Hanson (2:43:56.960)

the challenge is to try to produce better institutions. And as an academic, I'm aware that

Robin Hanson (2:44:03.120)

academia is particularly broken in the sense that we give people incentives to do research that's

Robin Hanson (2:44:09.760)

not very interesting or important because basically they're being impressive. And we actually care

Robin Hanson (2:44:15.120)

more about whether academics are impressive than whether they're interesting or useful.

Lex Fridman (2:44:20.160)

And I can go happy to go into detail with lots of different known institutions and their known

Robin Hanson (2:44:25.920)

institutional failings, ways in which those institutions produce incentives that are

Robin Hanson (2:44:31.040)

mistaken. And that was the point of the post we started with talking about the authorities. If

Robin Hanson (2:44:34.800)

I need to be seen as an authority, that's at odds with my being informative and I might choose to be

Robin Hanson (2:44:42.160)

the authority instead of being informative because that's my institutional incentives.

Lex Fridman (2:44:46.240)

And if I may, I'd like to, given that beautiful picture of incentives and individuals that you

Robin Hanson (2:44:54.320)

just painted, let me just apologize for a couple of things. One, I often put too much blame on

Robin Hanson (2:45:03.440)

leaders of institutions versus the incentives that govern those institutions. And as a result of that,

Robin Hanson (2:45:11.280)

I've been, I believe too critical of Anthony Fauci, too emotional about my criticism of

Robin Hanson (2:45:20.080)

Anthony Fauci. And I'd like to apologize for that because I think there's a deep, there's deeper

Robin Hanson (2:45:26.080)

truths to think about. There's deeper incentives to think about. That said, I do sort of, I'm a

Robin Hanson (2:45:32.000)

romantic creature by nature. I romanticize Winston Churchill. When I think about Nazi Germany,

Robin Hanson (2:45:42.480)

I think about Hitler more than I do about the individual people of Nazi Germany. You think

Robin Hanson (2:45:47.120)

about leaders, you think about individuals, not necessarily the parameters, the incentives that

Robin Hanson (2:45:51.760)

govern the system that, because it's harder. It's harder to think through deeply about the models

Robin Hanson (2:45:58.240)

from which those individuals arise, but that's the right thing to do. So, but also I don't apologize

Lex Fridman (2:46:05.760)

for being emotional sometimes and being.

Robin Hanson (2:46:07.680)

I'm happy to blame the individual leaders in the sense that, you know, I might say, well,

Robin Hanson (2:46:12.480)

you should be trying to reform these institutions if you're just there to like get promoted and look

Robin Hanson (2:46:17.360)

good at being at the top. But maybe I can blame you for your motives and your priorities in there,

Lex Fridman (2:46:22.000)

but I can understand why the people at the top would be the people who are selected for having

Robin Hanson (2:46:26.000)

the priority of primarily trying to get to the top. I get that.

Robin Hanson (2:46:29.200)

Can I maybe ask you about particular universities? They've received, like science has received an

Robin Hanson (2:46:36.880)

increase in distrust overall as an institution, which breaks my heart because I think science is

Robin Hanson (2:46:43.200)

beautiful as a, not maybe not as an institution, but as one of the things, one of the journeys that

Robin Hanson (2:46:51.360)

humans have taken on. The other one is university. I think university is actually a place for me,

Robin Hanson (2:46:58.800)

at least in the way I see it, is a place of freedom of exploring ideas, scientific ideas,

Robin Hanson (2:47:06.800)

engineering ideas, more than corporate, more than a company, more than a lot of domains in life.

Robin Hanson (2:47:15.600)

They're, it's not just in its ideal, but it's in its implementation, a place where you can

Robin Hanson (2:47:22.400)

be a kid for your whole life and play with ideas. And I think with all the criticism that universities

Robin Hanson (2:47:28.960)

still not currently receive, I think they, I don't think that criticism is representative

Robin Hanson (2:47:35.360)

of universities. They focus on very anecdotal evidence of particular departments, particular

Robin Hanson (2:47:39.760)

people, but I still feel like there's a lot of place for freedom of thought, at least MIT,

Robin Hanson (2:47:50.240)

at least in the fields I care about, in a particular kind of science, a particular kind

Robin Hanson (2:47:56.560)

of technical fields, mathematics, computer science, physics, engineering, so robotics,

Robin Hanson (2:48:02.560)

artificial intelligence. This is a place where you get to be a kid. Yet there is bureaucracy that's

Robin Hanson (2:48:12.240)

rising up. There's like more rules. There's more meetings and there's more administration

Robin Hanson (2:48:18.960)

having like PowerPoint presentations, which to me, you should like be more of a renegade

Robin Hanson (2:48:28.400)

explorer of ideas and meetings destroy, they suffocate that radical thought that happens

Robin Hanson (2:48:34.800)

when you're an undergraduate student and you can do all kinds of wild things when you're

Robin Hanson (2:48:38.240)

a graduate student. Anyway, all that to say, you've thought about this aspect too. Is there

Robin Hanson (2:48:42.400)

something positive, insightful you could say about how we can make for better universities

Lex Fridman (2:48:50.160)

in the decades to come? This particular institution, how can we improve them?

Robin Hanson (2:48:54.800)

I hear that centuries ago, many scientists and intellectuals were aristocrats. They had time

Lex Fridman (2:49:03.360)

and could, if they chose, choose to be intellectuals. That's a feature of the combination

Robin Hanson (2:49:12.000)

that they had some source of resources that allowed them leisure and that the kind of

Robin Hanson (2:49:17.680)

competition they were faced in among aristocrats allowed that sort of a self indulgence or

Robin Hanson (2:49:24.160)

self pursuit, at least at some point in their lives. So the analogous observation is that

Robin Hanson (2:49:32.240)

university professors often have sort of the freedom and space to do a wide range of things.

Lex Fridman (2:49:39.120)

And I am certainly enjoying that as a tenured professor.

Lex Fridman (2:49:42.880)

You're a really, sorry to interrupt, a really good representative of that.

Robin Hanson (2:49:46.960)

Just the exploration you're doing, the depth of thought, like most people are afraid to do the

Lex Fridman (2:49:52.880)

kind of broad thinking that you're doing, which is great.

Robin Hanson (2:49:55.920)

The fact that that can happen is a combination of these two things analogously. One is that

Robin Hanson (2:50:01.120)

we have fierce competition to become a tenured professor, but then once you become tenured,

Robin Hanson (2:50:05.040)

we give you the freedom to do what you like. And that's a happenstance. It didn't have to

Robin Hanson (2:50:11.360)

be that way. And in many other walks of life, even though people have a lot of resources,

Robin Hanson (2:50:16.640)

et cetera, they don't have that kind of freedom set up. So I think we're kind of,

Robin Hanson (2:50:20.480)

I'm kind of lucky that tenure exists and that I'm enjoying it. But I can't be too enthusiastic

Robin Hanson (2:50:28.000)

about this unless I can approve of sort of the source of the resources that's paying for all

Robin Hanson (2:50:31.760)

this. So for the aristocrat, if you thought they stole it in war or something, you wouldn't be so

Robin Hanson (2:50:37.440)

pleased. Whereas if you thought they had earned it or their ancestors had earned this money that

Robin Hanson (2:50:41.920)

they were spending as an aristocrat, then you could be more okay with that. So for universities,

Robin Hanson (2:50:47.120)

I have to ask, where are the main sources of resources that are going to the universities and

Lex Fridman (2:50:52.800)

are they getting their money's worth? Are they getting a good value for that payment?

Lex Fridman (2:50:58.160)

So first of all, they're students. And the question is, are students getting good value

Robin Hanson (2:51:03.840)

for their education? And each person is getting value in the sense that they are identified and

Robin Hanson (2:51:10.240)

shown to be a more capable person, which is then worth more salary as an employee later.

Lex Fridman (2:51:15.440)

But there is a case for saying there's a big waste to the system because we aren't actually

Robin Hanson (2:51:21.200)

changing the students or educating them. We're more sorting them or labeling them. And that's

Robin Hanson (2:51:27.280)

a very expensive process to produce that outcome. And part of the expense is the freedom from tenure,

Robin Hanson (2:51:33.200)

I guess. So I feel like I can't be too proud of that because it's basically a tax on all these

Robin Hanson (2:51:38.720)

young students to pay this enormous amount of money in order to be labeled as better. Whereas I

Robin Hanson (2:51:43.440)

feel like we should be able to find cheaper ways of doing that. The other main customer is

Robin Hanson (2:51:49.120)

researcher patrons like the government or other foundations. And then the question is,

Lex Fridman (2:51:54.160)

are they getting their money worth out of the money they're paying for research to happen?

Lex Fridman (2:51:59.920)

And my analysis is they don't actually care about the research progress. They are mainly

Robin Hanson (2:52:05.280)

buying an affiliation with credentialed impressiveness on the part of the researchers.

Robin Hanson (2:52:09.520)

They mainly pay money to researchers who are impressive and have high, you know,

Robin Hanson (2:52:13.840)

impressive affiliations. And they don't really much care what research project happens as a result.

Robin Hanson (2:52:18.880)

Is that a cynical? So there's a deep truth to that cynical perspective. Is there

Robin Hanson (2:52:26.720)

a less cynical perspective that they do care about the long term investment into the progress

Robin Hanson (2:52:32.640)

of science and humanity? Well, they might personally care, but they're stuck in an equilibrium.

Robin Hanson (2:52:37.680)

Sure.

Robin Hanson (2:52:38.160)

Wherein they, basically most foundations like governments or research or, you know,

Robin Hanson (2:52:43.600)

the Ford Foundation, they are, the individuals there are rated based on the prestige they bring

Robin Hanson (2:52:50.000)

to that organization. And even if they might personally want to produce more intellectual

Robin Hanson (2:52:54.800)

progress, they are in a competitive game where they don't have tenure and they need to produce

Robin Hanson (2:53:00.160)

this prestige. And so once they give grant money to prestigious people, that is the thing that

Robin Hanson (2:53:04.880)

shows that they have achieved prestige for the organization. And that's what they need to do in

Robin Hanson (2:53:08.800)

order to retain their position. And you do hope that there's a correlation between prestige and

Robin Hanson (2:53:14.800)

actual competence. Of course, there is a correlation. The question is just, could we do

Robin Hanson (2:53:19.760)

this better some other way? I think it's almost, I think it's pretty clear we could. What is harder

Robin Hanson (2:53:25.280)

to do is move the world to a new equilibrium where we do that instead. What are the components

Robin Hanson (2:53:31.520)

of the better ways to do it? Is it money? So how, the sources of money and how the money is

Robin Hanson (2:53:39.440)

allocated to give the individual researchers freedom? Years ago I started studying this topic

Robin Hanson (2:53:46.640)

exactly because this was my issue and this was many decades ago now. And I spent a long time

Lex Fridman (2:53:51.680)

and my best guess still is prediction markets, betting markets. So if you as a research

Robin Hanson (2:53:58.240)

paper patron want to know the answer to a particular question, like what's the mass of

Robin Hanson (2:54:02.800)

the electron neutrino, then what you can do is just subsidize a betting market in that question.

Lex Fridman (2:54:09.040)

And that will induce more research into answering that question because the people who then

Robin Hanson (2:54:13.440)

answer that question can then make money in that betting market with the new information they gain.

Lex Fridman (2:54:17.680)

So that's a robust way to induce more information on a topic. If you want to induce an

Robin Hanson (2:54:22.960)

accomplishment, you can create prizes. And there's of course a long history of prizes to induce

Robin Hanson (2:54:28.160)

accomplishments. And we moved away from prizes, even though we once used them far more often than

Robin Hanson (2:54:35.040)

we did today. And there's a history to that. And for the customers who want to be affiliated with

Robin Hanson (2:54:43.040)

impressive academics, which is what most of the customers want, students, journalists, and patrons,

Robin Hanson (2:54:48.320)

I think there's a better way of doing that, which I just wrote about in my second most recent blog

Robin Hanson (2:54:53.440)

post. Can you explain? Sure. What we do today is we take sort of acceptance by other academics

Robin Hanson (2:54:59.920)

recently as our best indication of their deserved prestige. That is recent publications, recent

Robin Hanson (2:55:07.280)

job affiliation, institutional affiliations, recent invitations to speak, recent grants.

Robin Hanson (2:55:13.840)

We are today taking other impressive academics, recent choices to affiliate with them as our best

Robin Hanson (2:55:21.440)

guesstimate of their prestige. I would say we could do better by creating betting markets in what the

Robin Hanson (2:55:28.000)

distant future will judge to have been their deserved prestige looking back on them. I think

Robin Hanson (2:55:34.000)

most intellectuals, for example, think that if we looked back two centuries, say to intellectuals

Robin Hanson (2:55:39.920)

from two centuries ago, and tried to look in detail at their research and how it influenced

Robin Hanson (2:55:45.680)

future research and which path it was on, we could much more accurately judge their actual

Robin Hanson (2:55:52.960)

deserved prestige. That is who was actually on the right track, who actually helped, which will be

Robin Hanson (2:55:58.080)

different than what people at the time judged using the immediate indications at the time of

Robin Hanson (2:56:02.640)

which position they had or which publications they had or things like that. So in this way,

Robin Hanson (2:56:07.440)

if you think from the perspective of multiple centuries, you would higher prioritize true

Robin Hanson (2:56:15.280)

novelty, you would disregard the temporal proximity, like how recent the thing is,

Lex Fridman (2:56:21.200)

and you would think like, what is the brave, the bold, the big, a novel idea that this sense,

Lex Fridman (2:56:27.600)

and you would actually, you would be able to rate that because you could see the path

Robin Hanson (2:56:31.520)

with which ideas took, which things had dead ends, which led to what other followings. You could,

Robin Hanson (2:56:36.080)

looking back centuries later, have a much better estimate of who actually had what long term

Robin Hanson (2:56:41.680)

effects on intellectual progress. So my proposal is we actually pay people in several centuries to

Robin Hanson (2:56:47.200)

do this historical analysis. And we have prediction markets today where we buy and sell

Robin Hanson (2:56:52.240)

assets, which will later off pay off in terms of those final evaluations. So now we'll be inducing

Robin Hanson (2:56:58.000)

people today to make their best estimate of those things by actually looking at the details of

Robin Hanson (2:57:03.280)

people and setting the prices accordingly. So my proposal would be we rate people today on those

Robin Hanson (2:57:08.320)

prices today. So instead of looking at their list of publications or affiliations, you look at the

Robin Hanson (2:57:12.640)

actual price of assets that represent people's best guess of what the future will say about them.

Lex Fridman (2:57:18.320)

That's brilliant. So this concept of idea futures, can you elaborate what this would entail?

Robin Hanson (2:57:26.720)

I've been elaborating two versions of it here. So one is if there's a particular question,

Robin Hanson (2:57:32.080)

say the mass of the electron neutrino, and what you as a patron want to do is get an answer to

Robin Hanson (2:57:37.200)

that question, then what you would do is subsidize the betting market in that question under the

Robin Hanson (2:57:42.800)

assumption that eventually we'll just know the answer and we can pay off the bets that way.

Lex Fridman (2:57:47.120)

And that is a plausible assumption for many kinds of concrete intellectual questions like what's the

Robin Hanson (2:57:51.760)

mass of the electron neutrino. In this hypothetical world that you're constructing that may be a real

Robin Hanson (2:57:56.480)

world, do you mean literally financial? Yes. Literal. Very literal. Very cash. Very direct

Lex Fridman (2:58:05.600)

and literal. Yes. Or crypto. Well, crypto is money. Yes, sure. So the idea would be research labs

Robin Hanson (2:58:12.560)

would be for profit. They would have as their expense paying researchers to study things and

Robin Hanson (2:58:17.840)

then their profit would come from using the insights the researchers gains to trade in these

Robin Hanson (2:58:22.080)

financial markets. Just like hedge funds today make money by paying researchers to study firms

Lex Fridman (2:58:28.880)

and then making their profits by trading on those that that insight in the ordinary financial market.

Lex Fridman (2:58:33.440)

And the market would, if it's efficient, would be able to become better and better at predicting

Robin Hanson (2:58:40.320)

the powerful ideas that the individual is able to generate. The variance around the mass of the

Robin Hanson (2:58:44.960)

electron neutrino would decrease with time as we learned that value of that parameter better and

Robin Hanson (2:58:49.360)

any other parameters that we wanted to estimate. You don't think those markets would also respond

Robin Hanson (2:58:53.760)

to recency of prestige and all those kinds of things? They would respond, but the question is

Robin Hanson (2:59:00.080)

if they might respond incorrectly, but if you think they're doing it incorrectly, you have a

Robin Hanson (2:59:03.920)

profit opportunity where you can go fix it. So we'd be inviting everybody to ask whether they can

Robin Hanson (2:59:10.160)

find any biases or errors in the current ways in which people are estimating these things from

Robin Hanson (2:59:14.000)

whatever clues they have. Right. There's a big incentive for the correction mechanism in academia

Robin Hanson (2:59:18.720)

currently. There's not, it's the safe choice to go with the prestige. Exactly. And there's no.

Robin Hanson (2:59:26.720)

Even if you privately think that the prestige is over overrated. Even if you think strongly that

Robin Hanson (2:59:33.280)

it's overrated. Still you don't have an incentive to defy that publicly. You're going to lose a lot

Robin Hanson (2:59:38.400)

unless you're a contrarian that writes brilliant blogs and then you could talk about it in the

Robin Hanson (2:59:44.640)

pocket. Right. I mean, initially this was my initial concept of having these betting markets

Robin Hanson (2:59:49.200)

on these key parameters. And what I then realized over time was that that's more what people

Robin Hanson (2:59:53.600)

pretend to care about. What they really mostly care about is just who's how good. And that's

Lex Fridman (2:59:58.400)

what most of the system is built on is trying to rate people and rank them. And so I designed this

Robin Hanson (30:03.680)

the model you have says that it's very unlikely, like we're lucky SOBs. Is that mathematically

Robin Hanson (30:11.280)

correct to say? We're crazy early. That is when early means like in the history of the universe.

Robin Hanson (30:18.240)

In the history. Okay. So given this model, how do we make sense of that? If we're super,

Lex Fridman (30:25.920)

can we just be the lucky ones? Well, 10 to the 18 lucky, you know,

Lex Fridman (30:30.480)

how lucky do you feel? So, you know, that's a pretty lucky, right? 10 to the 18 is a billion,

Lex Fridman (30:37.600)

billion. So then if you were just being honest and humble, that that means, what does that mean?

Robin Hanson (30:45.360)

It means one of the assumptions that calculated this crazy early must be wrong. That's what it

Robin Hanson (30:49.600)

means. So the key assumption we suggest is that the universe would stay empty. So most life would

Robin Hanson (30:56.160)

stay empty. So most life would appear like a thousand times longer later than now if everything

Lex Fridman (31:04.000)

would stay empty, waiting for it to appear. So what is not empty?

Lex Fridman (31:08.160)

So the grabby aliens are filling the universe right now. Roughly at the moment, they filled

Robin Hanson (31:11.760)

half of the universe and they've changed it. And when they fill everything, it's too late for stuff

Robin Hanson (31:16.480)

like us to appear. But wait, hold on a second. Did anyone help us get lucky? If it's so difficult,

Robin Hanson (31:24.480)

what, how do like, so it's like cancer, right? There's all these cells, each of which randomly

Robin Hanson (31:30.560)

does or doesn't get cancer. And eventually some cell gets cancer and you know, we were one of

Robin Hanson (31:35.840)

those, but hold on a second. Okay. But we got it early. We got early compared to the prediction

Robin Hanson (31:44.000)

with an assumption that's wrong. That's so that's how we do a lot of, you know, theoretical

Robin Hanson (31:48.560)

analysis. You have a model that makes a prediction that's wrong. Then that helps you reject that

Robin Hanson (31:52.640)

model. Okay. Let's try to understand exactly where the wrong is. So the assumption is that the

Robin Hanson (31:57.600)

universe is empty, stays empty, stays empty and waits until this advanced life appears in trillions

Robin Hanson (32:04.640)

of years. That is if the universe would just stay empty, if there was just, you know, nobody else

Robin Hanson (32:09.760)

out there, then when you should expect advanced life to appear, if you're the only one in the

Robin Hanson (32:14.880)

universe, when should you expect to appear? You should expect to appear trillions of years in the

Robin Hanson (32:18.480)

future. I see. Right, right. So this is a very sort of nuanced mathematical assumption. I don't

Robin Hanson (32:25.280)

think we can intuit it cleanly with words. But if you assume that you're just wait, the universe

Robin Hanson (32:33.680)

stays empty and you're waiting for one life civilization to pop up, then it's gonna, it

Robin Hanson (32:41.840)

should happen very late, much later than now. And if you look at Earth, the way things happen on

Robin Hanson (32:48.640)

Earth, it happened much, much, much, much, much earlier than it was supposed to according to this

Robin Hanson (32:53.120)

model. If you take the initial assumption, therefore you can say, well, the initial assumption of the

Robin Hanson (32:58.240)

universe staying empty is very unlikely. Right. And the other alternative theory is the universe

Robin Hanson (33:04.880)

is filling up and will fill up soon. And so we are typical for the origin data of things that

Robin Hanson (33:10.560)

can appear before the deadline. Before the deadline. Okay, it's filling up. So why don't we see anything

Robin Hanson (33:15.280)

if it's filling up? Because they're expanding really fast. Close to the speed of light. Exactly.

Lex Fridman (33:20.560)

So we will only see it when it's here. Almost here. Okay. What are the ways in which we might see

Robin Hanson (33:28.160)

a quickly expanding? This is both exciting and terrifying. It is terrifying. It's like watching

Robin Hanson (33:34.240)

a truck, like driving at you at 100 miles an hour. And so we would see spheres in the sky,

Robin Hanson (33:41.600)

at least one sphere in the sky, growing very rapidly. And like very rapidly, right? Yes,

Robin Hanson (33:49.440)

very rapidly. So we're not, so there's, there's, you know, different def because we were just

Robin Hanson (33:54.720)

talking about 10 million years. This would be, you might see it 10 million years in advance coming.

Robin Hanson (34:00.400)

I mean, you still might have a long warning. Again, the universe is 14 billion years old.

Robin Hanson (34:05.920)

The typical origin times of these things are spread over several billion years. So the chance

Robin Hanson (34:10.560)

of one originating at a, you know, very close to you in time is very low. So they still might take

Robin Hanson (34:16.720)

millions of years from the time you see it, from the time it gets here. You'll have a million years

Robin Hanson (34:22.080)

of your years to be terrified of this mass sphere coming at you. But coming at you very fast. So if

Robin Hanson (34:27.280)

they're traveling close to the speed of light, but they're coming from a long way away. So remember,

Robin Hanson (34:32.320)

the rate at which they appear is one per million galaxies, right? So they're roughly a hundred

Robin Hanson (34:38.240)

galaxies away. I see. So the Delta between the speed of light and their actual travel speed is

Robin Hanson (34:45.360)

very important, right? So even if they're going at say half the speed of light, we'll have a long

Robin Hanson (34:50.320)

time then. Yeah. But what if they're traveling exactly at a speed of light? Then we see them,

Robin Hanson (34:55.600)

like then we wouldn't have much warning, but that's less likely. Well, we can't exclude it.

Lex Fridman (35:00.560)

And they could also be somehow traveling faster than the speed of light.

Lex Fridman (35:04.800)

But I think we can't exclude because if they could go faster than the speed of light, then

Robin Hanson (35:08.720)

they would just already be everywhere. So in a universe where you can travel faster than the

Robin Hanson (35:13.200)

speed of light, you can go backwards in space time. So any time you appeared anywhere in space

Robin Hanson (35:17.520)

time, you could just fill up everything. Yeah. And so anybody in the future, whoever appeared,

Robin Hanson (35:22.880)

they would have been here by now. Can you exclude the possibility that those kinds of aliens aren't

Robin Hanson (35:27.600)

already here? Well, you have, we should have a different discussion of that. Okay. So let's

Robin Hanson (35:33.840)

actually lead that. Let's leave that discussion aside just to linger and understand the grabby

Robin Hanson (35:38.800)

alien expansion, which is beautiful and fascinating. Okay. So there's these giant expanding

Robin Hanson (35:45.680)

spheres of alien civilizations. Now, when those spheres collide, mathematically,

Robin Hanson (35:59.920)

it's very likely that we're not the first collision of grabby alien civilizations,

Robin Hanson (36:07.120)

I suppose is one way to say it. So there's like the first time the spheres touch each other,

Robin Hanson (36:12.560)

recognize each other. They meet. They recognize each other first before they meet.

Robin Hanson (36:19.760)

They see each other coming. They see each other coming. And then, so there's a bunch of them.

Robin Hanson (36:23.600)

There's a combinatorial thing where they start seeing each other coming. And then there's a

Robin Hanson (36:27.520)

third neighbor. It's like, what the hell? And then there's a fourth one. Okay. So what does that,

Robin Hanson (36:31.760)

you think, look like? What lessons from human nature, that's the only data we have,

Robin Hanson (36:38.640)

well, can you draw the story of the history of the universe here is what I would call a living

Robin Hanson (36:44.800)

cosmology. So what I'm excited about in part by this model is that it lets us tell a story of

Robin Hanson (36:51.120)

cosmology where there are actors who have agendas. So most ancient peoples, they had cosmologies,

Robin Hanson (36:57.840)

stories they told about where the universe came from and where it's going and what's happening

Robin Hanson (37:01.120)

out there. And their stories, they like to have agents and actors, gods or something out there

Robin Hanson (37:04.960)

doing things. And lately our favorite cosmology is dead, kind of boring. We're the only activity

Robin Hanson (37:12.160)

we know about or see and everything else just looks dead and empty. But this is now telling us,

Robin Hanson (37:17.920)

no, that's not quite right. At the moment, the universe is filling up and in a few billion years,

Robin Hanson (37:22.960)

it'll be all full. And from then on, the history of the universe will be the universe full of aliens.

Robin Hanson (37:29.040)

LW. Yeah. So that's a really good reminder, a really good way to think about cosmology is we're

Robin Hanson (37:35.360)

surrounded by a vast darkness and we don't know what's going on in that darkness until the light

Robin Hanson (37:42.880)

from whatever generate lights arrives here. So we kind of, yeah, we look up at the sky,

Robin Hanson (37:48.080)

okay, there's stars, oh, they're pretty, but you don't think about the giant expanding spheres of

Robin Hanson (37:55.360)

aliens because you don't see them. But now our date, looking at the clock, if you're clever,

Robin Hanson (38:01.200)

the clock tells you. So I like the analogy with the ancient Greeks. So you might think that an

Robin Hanson (38:06.080)

ancient Greek staring at the universe couldn't possibly tell how far away the sun was or how

Robin Hanson (38:11.280)

far away the moon is or how big the earth is. All you can see is just big things in the sky,

Robin Hanson (38:16.240)

you can't tell. But they were clever enough actually to be able to figure out the size of

Robin Hanson (38:19.600)

the earth and the distance to the moon and the sun and the size of the moon and sun. That is,

Robin Hanson (38:24.880)

they could figure those things out actually by being clever enough. And so similarly,

Robin Hanson (38:28.560)

we can actually figure out where are the aliens out there in space time by being clever about the

Robin Hanson (38:32.720)

few things we can see, one of which is our current date. And so now that you have this living

Robin Hanson (38:37.600)

cosmology, we can tell the story that the universe starts out empty and then at some point, things

Robin Hanson (38:43.200)

like us appear very primitive and then some of those stop being quiet and expand. And then for

Robin Hanson (38:49.440)

a few billion years, they expand and then they meet each other. And then for the next hundred

Robin Hanson (38:53.680)

billion years, they commune with each other. That is, the usual models of cosmology say that in

Robin Hanson (38:59.360)

roughly 150 billion years, the expansion of the universe will happen so much that all you'll have

Robin Hanson (39:06.080)

left is some galaxy clusters that are sort of disconnected from each other. But before then,

Robin Hanson (39:11.840)

for the next hundred billion years, they will interact. There will be this community of all the

Robin Hanson (39:19.680)

grabby alien civilizations and each one of them will hear about and even meet thousands of others.

Lex Fridman (39:24.880)

And we might hope to join them someday and become part of that community. That's an interesting

Robin Hanson (39:30.720)

thing to aspire to. Yes, interesting is an interesting word. Is the universe of alien

Lex Fridman (39:38.000)

civilizations defined by war as much or more than war defined human history?

Robin Hanson (39:47.360)

I would say it's defined by competition and then the question is how much competition implies war.

Lex Fridman (39:57.120)

So up until recently, competition defined life on Earth. Competition between species and organisms

Robin Hanson (3:00:03.200)

other alternative based on historical evaluation centuries later, just about who's how good,

Lex Fridman (3:00:08.480)

because that's what I think most of the customers really care about.

Robin Hanson (3:00:10.720)

Customers. I like the word customers here. Humans. Right. Well, every major area of life,

Robin Hanson (3:00:16.400)

which, you know, has specialists who get paid to do that thing must have some customers from

Lex Fridman (3:00:20.480)

elsewhere who are paying for it. Well, who are the customers for the mass of the neutrino?

Robin Hanson (3:00:25.280)

Yes. I, I, I understand that a sense people who are willing to pay. Right. For a thing.

Robin Hanson (3:00:33.440)

That's an important thing to understand about anything. Who are the customers? So when I think

Lex Fridman (3:00:36.960)

and what's the product, like medicine, education, academia, military, et cetera, that's part of the

Robin Hanson (3:00:42.960)

hidden motives analysis. Often people have a thing they say about what the product is and who the

Robin Hanson (3:00:46.720)

customer is. And maybe you need to dig a little deeper to find out what's really going on.

Robin Hanson (3:00:50.800)

Or a lot deeper. You, uh, you've written that you seek out quote view quakes. You're able as a,

Robin Hanson (3:00:59.520)

uh, as an intelligent black box word generating machine, you're able to generate a lot of sexy

Robin Hanson (3:01:03.680)

words. I like it. I love it. View quakes, which are insights, which dramatically changed my

Robin Hanson (3:01:10.720)

worldview, your worldview. Uh, you write, I loved science fiction as a child studied physics and

Robin Hanson (3:01:17.840)

artificial intelligence for a long time each, and now study economics and political science,

Robin Hanson (3:01:23.520)

all fields full of such insights. So let me ask, what are some view quakes or a beautiful,

Lex Fridman (3:01:30.960)

surprising idea to you from each of those fields, physics, AI, economics, political science?

Robin Hanson (3:01:36.800)

I know it's a tough question. Something that springs to mind about physics, for example,

Robin Hanson (3:01:40.960)

that just as beautiful. I mean, right from the beginning, say special relativity was a big

Robin Hanson (3:01:45.600)

surprise. Uh, you know, most of us have a simple concept of time and it seems perfectly adequate

Robin Hanson (3:01:51.120)

for everything we've ever seen. And to have it explained to you that you need to sort of have a

Robin Hanson (3:01:55.600)

mixture concept of time and space where you put it into the space time construct, how it looks

Robin Hanson (3:02:00.880)

different from different perspectives. That was quite a shock. And that was, you know, such a

Robin Hanson (3:02:06.480)

shock that it makes you think, what else do I know that, you know, isn't the way it seems. Certainly

Robin Hanson (3:02:11.920)

quantum mechanics is certainly another enormous shock in terms of from your point, you know,

Robin Hanson (3:02:16.480)

you have this idea that there's a space and then there's, you know, point particles at points and

Robin Hanson (3:02:21.440)

maybe fields in between. And, um, quantum mechanics is just a whole different representation. It looks

Robin Hanson (3:02:28.240)

nothing like what you would have thought as sort of the basic representation of the physical world.

Lex Fridman (3:02:32.880)

And that was quite a surprise. What would you say is the catalyst for the, for the view quake in

Robin Hanson (3:02:39.120)

theoretical physics in the 20th century? Where does that come from? So the interesting thing

Robin Hanson (3:02:43.040)

about Einstein, it seems like a lot of that came from like almost thought experiments. It wasn't

Robin Hanson (3:02:47.520)

almost experimentally driven. Um, and with, actually, I don't know the full story of quantum

Robin Hanson (3:02:55.520)

mechanics, how much of it is experiment, like where, if you, if you look at the full trace of

Robin Hanson (3:03:01.360)

idea generation there, uh, of all the weird stuff that falls out of quantum mechanics, how much of

Robin Hanson (3:03:07.040)

that was the experimentalist? How much was it the theoreticians? But usually in theoretical

Robin Hanson (3:03:11.520)

physics, the theories lead the way. So maybe can you, uh, can you elucidate like what, what is the

Robin Hanson (3:03:18.720)

catalyst for these? The remarkable thing about physics and about many other areas of academic

Robin Hanson (3:03:24.800)

intellectual life is that it just seems way overdetermined. That is, if it hadn't been for

Robin Hanson (3:03:31.360)

Einstein or if it hadn't been for Heisenberg, certainly within a half a century, somebody else

Robin Hanson (3:03:36.640)

would have come up with essentially the same things. Is that something you believe or is that

Robin Hanson (3:03:41.520)

something? Yes. So I think when you look at sort of just the history of physics and the history of

Robin Hanson (3:03:46.160)

other areas, you know, some areas like that, there's just this enormous convergence that the,

Robin Hanson (3:03:51.040)

the different kinds of evidence that was being collected was so redundant in the sense that so

Robin Hanson (3:03:56.400)

many different things revealed the same things that eventually you just kind of have to accept it

Robin Hanson (3:04:02.320)

because it just gets obvious. So if you look at the details, of course, you know, Einstein did it

Robin Hanson (3:04:08.720)

for somebody else and it's well worth celebrating Einstein for that. And, you know, we, by

Robin Hanson (3:04:13.920)

celebrating the particular people who did something first or came across something first,

Robin Hanson (3:04:17.840)

we are encouraging all the rest to move a little faster, to try to, to push us all a little faster,

Robin Hanson (3:04:25.360)

which is great. But I still think we would have gotten roughly to the same place within a half

Robin Hanson (3:04:32.080)

century. So sometimes people are special because of how much longer it would have taken. So some

Robin Hanson (3:04:37.760)

people say general relativity would have taken longer without Einstein than other things. I mean,

Robin Hanson (3:04:42.720)

Heisenberg quantum mechanics, I mean, there were several different formulations of quantum mechanics

Robin Hanson (3:04:46.080)

all around the same few years, means no one of them made that much of a difference. We would have

Robin Hanson (3:04:51.280)

had pretty much the same thing regardless of which of them did it exactly when. Nevertheless,

Robin Hanson (3:04:56.800)

I'm happy to celebrate them all. But this is a choice I make in my research. That is, when there's

Robin Hanson (3:05:00.960)

an area where there's lots of people working together, you know, who are sort of scoping each

Robin Hanson (3:05:05.680)

other and getting a result just before somebody else does, you ask, well, how much of a difference

Robin Hanson (3:05:10.080)

would I make there? At most, I could make something happen a few months before somebody else. And so

Robin Hanson (3:05:16.400)

I'm less worried about them missing things. So when I'm trying to help the world, like doing research,

Robin Hanson (3:05:21.200)

I'm looking for neglected things. I'm looking for things that nobody's doing it. If I didn't do it,

Robin Hanson (3:05:25.040)

nobody would do it. Nobody would do it. Or at least for a long time. In the next 10, 20 years,

Lex Fridman (3:05:28.800)

kind of thing. Right, exactly. Same with general relativity, just, you know, who would do it?

Robin Hanson (3:05:33.280)

It might take another 10, 20, 30, 50 years. So that's the place where you can have the

Lex Fridman (3:05:36.960)

biggest impact is finding the things that nobody would do unless you did them.

Lex Fridman (3:05:40.560)

And then that's when you get the big view quake, the insight. So what about artificial

Robin Hanson (3:05:45.200)

intelligence? Would it be the EMs, the emulated minds? What idea, whether that struck you in the

Robin Hanson (3:05:56.480)

shower one day or that you just...

Robin Hanson (3:06:00.480)

Clearly, the biggest view quake in artificial intelligence is the realization of just how

Robin Hanson (3:06:05.920)

complicated our human minds are. So most people who come to artificial intelligence from other

Robin Hanson (3:06:11.600)

fields or from relative ignorance, a very common phenomenon, which you must be familiar with,

Robin Hanson (3:06:17.200)

is that they come up with some concept and then they think that must be it. Once we implement this

Robin Hanson (3:06:22.560)

new concept, we will have it. We will have full human level or higher artificial intelligence,

Robin Hanson (3:06:27.200)

right? And they're just not appreciating just how big the problem is, how long the road is,

Robin Hanson (3:06:32.080)

just how much is involved, because that's actually hard to appreciate. When we just think,

Robin Hanson (3:06:36.800)

it seems really simple. And studying artificial intelligence, going through many particular

Robin Hanson (3:06:41.760)

problems, looking at each problem, all the different things you need to be able to do

Robin Hanson (3:06:45.200)

to solve a problem like that, makes you realize all the things your minds are doing that you

Robin Hanson (3:06:50.240)

are not aware of. That's that vast subconscious that you're not aware of. That's the biggest

Robin Hanson (3:06:55.120)

view quake from artificial intelligence by far for most people who study artificial intelligence,

Robin Hanson (3:06:59.360)

is to see just how hard it is. I think that's a good point. But I think it's a very early

Robin Hanson (3:07:07.200)

view quake. It's when the Dunning Kruger crashes hard. It's the first realization that humans are

Robin Hanson (3:07:16.880)

actually quite incredible. The human mind, the human body is quite incredible. There's a lot

Robin Hanson (3:07:20.800)

of different parts to it. But then, see, it's already been so long for me to think about

Robin Hanson (3:07:27.680)

it. It's already been so long for me that I've experienced that view quake that, for me,

Robin Hanson (3:07:32.160)

I now experience the view quakes of, holy shit, this little thing is actually quite powerful,

Robin Hanson (3:07:37.280)

like neural networks. I'm amazed. Because you've become almost cynical after that first view quake

Robin Hanson (3:07:45.360)

of, like, this is so hard. Like, evolution did some incredible work to create the human mind.

Lex Fridman (3:07:52.080)

But then you realize, just like you have, you've talked about a bunch of simple models

Robin Hanson (3:07:57.120)

that simple things can actually be extremely powerful, that maybe emulating the human mind

Robin Hanson (3:08:04.320)

is extremely difficult. But you can go a long way with a large neural network. You can go a long way

Robin Hanson (3:08:09.840)

with a dumb solution. It's that Stuart Russell thing with the reinforcement learning. Holy crap,

Robin Hanson (3:08:15.040)

you can go quite a long way with a simple thing. But we still have a very long road to go,

Lex Fridman (3:08:18.960)

but not unless... I can't, I refuse to sort of know. The road is full of surprises. So long is

Robin Hanson (3:08:29.040)

an interesting, like you said, with the six hard steps that humans have to take to arrive at where

Robin Hanson (3:08:34.800)

we are from the origin of life on Earth. So it's long, maybe, in the statistical improbability of

Robin Hanson (3:08:42.000)

the steps that have to be taken. But in terms of how quickly those steps could be taken,

Robin Hanson (3:08:47.200)

I don't know if my intuition says it's, if it's hundreds of years away or if it's a couple of

Lex Fridman (3:08:55.520)

years away, I prefer to measure... Pretty confidence, at least a decade. And

Robin Hanson (3:09:00.560)

mildly confidence, at least three decades. I can steal man either direction. I prefer to

Robin Hanson (3:09:05.360)

measure that journey in Elon Musk's. That's a new... Well, we don't get Elon Musk very often,

Lex Fridman (3:09:10.240)

so that's a long timescale. For now, I don't know, maybe you can clone or maybe multiply or

Robin Hanson (3:09:16.160)

even know what Elon Musk, what that is. What is that? What is... That's a good question.

Robin Hanson (3:09:21.120)

Exactly. Well, that's an excellent question. How does that fit into the model of the three

Robin Hanson (3:09:26.160)

parameters that are required for becoming a grabby alien civilization? That's the question of how

Robin Hanson (3:09:33.920)

much any individual makes in the long path of civilization over time. Yes. And it's a favorite

Robin Hanson (3:09:39.680)

topic of historians and people to try to focus on individuals and how much of a difference they

Robin Hanson (3:09:44.320)

make. And certainly, some individuals make a substantial difference in the modest term,

Robin Hanson (3:09:49.120)

right? Like, you know, without Hitler being Hitler in the role he took, European history would

Robin Hanson (3:09:55.600)

have taken a different path for a while there. But if we're looking over like many centuries

Lex Fridman (3:10:00.400)

longer term things, most individuals do fade in their individual influence.

Robin Hanson (3:10:04.800)

So, I mean... Even Einstein. Even Einstein, no matter how sexy your hair is, you will also be

Robin Hanson (3:10:13.040)

forgotten in the long arc of history. So you said at least 10 years. So let's talk a little bit about

Robin Hanson (3:10:20.320)

this AI point of where, how we achieve, how hard is the problem of solving intelligence

Lex Fridman (3:10:28.800)

is the problem of solving intelligence by engineering artificial intelligence

Robin Hanson (3:10:35.280)

that achieves human level, human like qualities that we associate with intelligence. How hard

Robin Hanson (3:10:41.600)

is this? What are the different trajectories that take us there? One way to think about it

Robin Hanson (3:10:46.480)

is in terms of the scope of the technology space you're talking about. So let's take the biggest

Robin Hanson (3:10:52.560)

possible scope, all of human technology, right? The entire human economy. So the entire economy

Robin Hanson (3:11:00.080)

is composed of many industries, each of which have many products with many different technologies

Robin Hanson (3:11:04.880)

supporting each one. At that scale, I think we can accept that most innovations are a small

Robin Hanson (3:11:13.440)

fraction of the total. That is usually have relatively gradual overall progress. And that

Robin Hanson (3:11:20.240)

individual innovations that have a substantial effect that total are rare and their total effect

Robin Hanson (3:11:25.920)

is still a small percentage of the total economy. There's very few individual innovations that

Robin Hanson (3:11:31.520)

made a substantial difference to the whole economy. What are we talking? Steam engine,

Robin Hanson (3:11:35.920)

shipping containers, a few things. Shipping containers deserves to be up there with steam

Robin Hanson (3:11:42.400)

engines, honestly. Can you say exactly why shipping containers... Shipping containers

Robin Hanson (3:11:48.320)

revolutionized shipping. Shipping is very important. But placing that at shipping containers.

Lex Fridman (3:11:55.280)

So you're saying you wouldn't have some of the magic of the supply chain, all that,

Robin Hanson (3:11:59.040)

without shipping containers. That made a big difference, absolutely. Interesting. That's

Robin Hanson (3:12:02.960)

something to look into. We shouldn't take that tangent, although I'm tempted to. But anyway,

Lex Fridman (3:12:08.480)

so there's a few, just a few innovations. Right. So at the scale of the whole economy, right?

Robin Hanson (3:12:13.360)

Right. Now, as you move down to a much smaller scale, you will see individual innovations

Robin Hanson (3:12:19.360)

having a bigger effect, right? So if you look at, I don't know, lawnmowers or something,

Robin Hanson (3:12:24.720)

I don't know about the innovations lawnmower, but there were probably like steps where you

Robin Hanson (3:12:28.320)

just had a new kind of lawnmower and that made a big difference to mowing lawns because you're

Robin Hanson (3:12:34.240)

focusing on a smaller part of the whole technology space, right? And sometimes like military

Robin Hanson (3:12:41.840)

technology, there's a lot of military technologies, a lot of small ones, but every once in a while,

Robin Hanson (3:12:45.200)

a particular military weapon like makes a big difference. But still, even so, mostly overall,

Robin Hanson (3:12:51.200)

they're making modest differences to something that's increasing relatively soon. Like US military

Robin Hanson (3:12:56.880)

is the strongest in the world consistently for a while. No one weapon in the last 70 years has

Robin Hanson (3:13:02.960)

made a big difference in terms of the overall prominence of the US military, right? Because

Robin Hanson (3:13:07.440)

that's just saying, even though every once in a while, even the recent Soviet hyper missiles or

Lex Fridman (3:13:12.160)

whatever they are, they aren't changing the overall balance dramatically, right?

Lex Fridman (3:13:18.000)

So when we get to AI, now I can frame the question, how big is AI? Basically, so one way of

Robin Hanson (3:13:25.840)

thinking about AI is it's just all mental tasks. And then you ask what fraction of tasks are mental

Robin Hanson (3:13:30.560)

tasks? And then I go, a lot. And then if I think of AI as like half of everything, then I think,

Robin Hanson (3:13:38.960)

well, it's got to be composed of lots of parts where any one innovation is only a small impact,

Robin Hanson (3:13:44.000)

right? Now, if you think, no, no, no, AI is like AGI. And then you think AGI is a small thing,

Robin Hanson (3:13:52.560)

right? There's only a small number of key innovations that will enable it. Now you're

Robin Hanson (3:13:57.680)

thinking there could be a bigger chunk that you might find that would have a bigger impact. So

Robin Hanson (3:14:03.040)

the way I would ask you to frame these things in terms of the chunkiness of different areas of

Robin Hanson (3:14:08.320)

technology, in part, in terms of how big they are. If you take 10 chunky areas and you add them

Robin Hanson (3:14:13.920)

together, the total is less chunky. Yeah. But don't you, are you able until you solve

Lex Fridman (3:14:19.760)

the fundamental core parts of the problem to estimate the chunkiness of that problem?

Robin Hanson (3:14:24.320)

Well, if you have a history of prior chunkiness, that could be your best estimate for future

Robin Hanson (3:14:29.920)

chunkiness. So for example, I mean, even at the level of the world economy, right? We've had this,

Robin Hanson (3:14:34.800)

what, 10,000 years of civilization. Well, that's only a short time. You might say, oh, that doesn't

Robin Hanson (3:14:40.720)

predict future chunkiness. But it looks relatively steady and consistent. We can say even in computer

Robin Hanson (3:14:47.760)

science, we've had 70 years of computer science. We have enough data to look at chunkiness of

Robin Hanson (3:14:52.480)

computer science. Like when were there algorithms or approaches that made a big chunky difference

Lex Fridman (3:15:00.960)

and how large a fraction of that was that? And I'd say mostly in computer science,

Robin Hanson (3:15:05.680)

most innovation has been relatively small chunks. The bigger chunks have been rare.

Robin Hanson (3:15:09.920)

Well, this is the interesting thing. This is about AI and just algorithms in general is

Robin Hanson (3:15:14.640)

page rank. So Google's, right? So sometimes it's a simple algorithm that by itself is not that useful,

Lex Fridman (3:15:27.360)

but the scale of context and in a context that's scalable, depending on the context,

Robin Hanson (3:15:34.480)

all of a sudden the power is revealed. And there's something, I guess that's the nature of chunkiness

Robin Hanson (3:15:38.960)

is that things that can reach a lot of people simply can be quite chunky.

Lex Fridman (3:15:45.840)

So one standard story about algorithms is to say algorithms have a fixed cost plus a marginal cost.

Lex Fridman (3:15:53.680)

And so in history, when you had computers that were very small, you tried all the algorithms

Robin Hanson (3:15:58.720)

that had low fixed costs and you look for the best of those. But over time, as computers got bigger,

Robin Hanson (3:16:04.160)

you could afford to do larger fixed costs and try those. And some of those had more effective

Robin Hanson (3:16:09.360)

algorithms in terms of their marginal cost. And that, in fact, that roughly explains the

Robin Hanson (3:16:15.040)

longterm history where in fact, the rate of algorithmic improvement is about the same as

Robin Hanson (3:16:19.040)

the rate of hardware improvement, which is a remarkable coincidence. But it would be explained

Robin Hanson (3:16:25.280)

by saying, well, there's all these better algorithms you can't try until you have a big enough computer

Robin Hanson (3:16:30.480)

to pay the fixed cost of doing some trials to find out if that algorithm actually saves you

Robin Hanson (3:16:35.360)

on the marginal cost. And so that's an explanation for this relatively continuous history. So we have

Robin Hanson (3:16:41.600)

a good story about why hardware is so continuous. And you might think, why would software be so

Robin Hanson (3:16:45.520)

continuous with the hardware? But if there's a distribution of algorithms in terms of their fixed

Robin Hanson (3:16:50.320)

costs, and it's, say, spread out at a wide log normal distribution, then we could be sort of

Robin Hanson (3:16:55.840)

marching through that log normal distribution, trying out algorithms with larger fixed costs and

Lex Fridman (3:17:00.560)

finding the ones that have lower marginal costs.

Lex Fridman (3:17:02.880)

So would you say AGI, human level, AI, even EM, M, emulated minds, is chunky? Like a few

Lex Fridman (3:17:18.480)

breakthroughs can take us.

Lex Fridman (3:17:19.680)

So an M is by its nature chunky in the sense that if you have an emulated brain and you're

Robin Hanson (3:17:25.280)

25% effective at emulating it, that's crap. That's nothing. Okay. You pretty much need to

Robin Hanson (3:17:32.800)

emulate a full human brain.

Lex Fridman (3:17:34.240)

Is that obvious? Is that obvious?

Robin Hanson (3:17:36.320)

It's pretty obvious. I'm talking about like, you know, so the key thing is you're emulating

Robin Hanson (3:17:41.680)

various brain cells. And so you have to emulate the input output pattern of those cells. So if

Robin Hanson (3:17:46.400)

you get that pattern somewhat close, but not close enough, then the whole system just doesn't have

Lex Fridman (3:17:51.600)

the overall behavior you're looking for, right?

Lex Fridman (3:17:53.280)

But it could have functionally some of the power of the overall system.

Lex Fridman (3:17:57.200)

So there'll be some threshold. The point is when you get close enough, then it goes over the

Lex Fridman (3:18:00.800)

threshold, right? It's like taking a computer chip and deleting every 1% of the gates, right?

Robin Hanson (3:18:05.920)

No, that's very chunky. But the hope is that emulating the human brain, I mean, the human

Robin Hanson (3:18:12.400)

brain itself is not...

Robin Hanson (3:18:13.440)

Right. So it has a certain level of redundancy and a certain level of robustness. And so there's

Robin Hanson (3:18:17.280)

some threshold when you get close to that level of redundancy or robustness, then it starts to

Robin Hanson (3:18:20.640)

work. But until you get to that level, it's just going to be crap, right? It's going to be just a

Robin Hanson (3:18:25.520)

big thing that isn't working for us. So we can be pretty sure that emulations is a big chunk in an

Robin Hanson (3:18:32.320)

economic sense, right? At some point, you'll be able to make one that's actually effective in

Robin Hanson (3:18:37.520)

enable substituting for humans. And then that will be this huge economic product that people will

Lex Fridman (3:18:42.560)

try to buy like crazy.

Robin Hanson (3:18:43.520)

You'll bring a lot of value to people's lives, so they'll be willing to pay for it.

Robin Hanson (3:18:47.360)

Right. But it could be that the first emulation costs a billion dollars each, right? And then we

Robin Hanson (3:18:53.360)

have them, but we can't really use them. They're too expensive. And then the cost slowly comes

Robin Hanson (3:18:56.400)

down. And now we have less of a chunky adoption, right? That as the cost comes down, then we use

Robin Hanson (3:19:03.680)

more and more of them in more and more contexts. And that's a more continuous curve. So it's only

Robin Hanson (3:19:10.160)

if the first emulations are relatively cheap that you get a more sudden disruption to society.

Lex Fridman (3:19:15.760)

And that could happen if sort of the algorithm is the last thing you figure out how to do or

Lex Fridman (3:19:19.360)

something.

Lex Fridman (3:19:19.840)

What about robots that capture some magic in terms of social connection? The robots, like we have a

Robin Hanson (3:19:28.160)

robot dog on the carpet right there. Robots that are able to capture some magic of human connection

Lex Fridman (3:19:36.160)

as they interact with humans, but are not emulating the brain. What about those? How far away?

Lex Fridman (3:19:42.560)

So we're thinking about chunkiness or distance now. So if you ask how chunky is the task of making

Robin Hanson (3:19:48.320)

a, you know, emulatable robot or something, which chunkiness and time are correlated.

Robin Hanson (3:19:55.760)

Right. But it's about how far away it is or how suddenly it would happen. Chunkiness is how

Robin Hanson (3:20:01.680)

suddenly and difficulty is just how far away it is. But it could be a continuous difficulty. It

Robin Hanson (3:20:07.360)

would just be far away, but we'll slowly steadily get there. Or there could be these thresholds where

Robin Hanson (3:20:14.720)

we reach a threshold and suddenly we can do a lot better.

Robin Hanson (3:20:17.040)

Yeah. That's a good question for both. I tend to believe that all of it, not just the M, but AGI

Robin Hanson (3:20:24.400)

too is chunky and human level intelligence embodied in robots is also chunky.

Robin Hanson (3:20:31.920)

The history of computer science and chunkiness so far seems to be my rough best guess for the

Robin Hanson (3:20:36.720)

penis of AGI. That is, it is chunky.

Lex Fridman (3:20:39.440)

It's modestly chunky, not that chunky. Right.

Robin Hanson (3:20:43.920)

Our ability to use computers to do many things in the economy has been moving relatively steadily.

Lex Fridman (3:20:48.560)

Overall, in terms of our use of computers in society,

Robin Hanson (3:20:52.480)

they have been relatively steadily improving for 70 years.

Robin Hanson (3:20:55.680)

No, but I would say that's hard. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I would have to really think about that

Robin Hanson (3:21:00.400)

because neural networks are quite surprising.

Robin Hanson (3:21:03.200)

Sure. But every once in a while we have a new thing that's surprising. But if you stand back,

Robin Hanson (3:21:07.120)

you know, we see something like that every 10 years or so, some new innovation that has a big effect.

Lex Fridman (3:21:12.800)

So, moderately chunky. Yeah.

Lex Fridman (3:21:19.040)

But the history of the level of disruption we've seen in the past would be a rough

Lex Fridman (3:21:22.240)

estimate of the level of disruption in the future. Unless the future is,

Robin Hanson (3:21:25.280)

we're going to hit a chunky territory, much chunkier than we've seen in the past.

Lex Fridman (3:21:28.720)

Well, I do think there's, it's like, like Kuhnian, like revolution type.

Robin Hanson (3:21:36.720)

It seems like the data, especially on AI, is difficult to reason with because it's so recent,

Lex Fridman (3:21:46.560)

it's such a recent field. Wow, AI's been around for 50 years.

Robin Hanson (3:21:50.560)

I mean, 50, 60, 70, 80 years being recent. Okay.

Lex Fridman (3:21:53.920)

It's enough time to see a lot of trends.

Robin Hanson (3:21:58.720)

A few trends, a few trends. I think the internet, computing, there's really a lot of interesting

Robin Hanson (3:22:06.640)

stuff that's happened over the past 30 years that I think the possibility of revolutions

Robin Hanson (3:22:13.760)

is likelier than it was in the... I think for the last 70 years,

Robin Hanson (3:22:17.840)

there have always been a lot of things that look like they had a potential for revolution.

Lex Fridman (3:22:21.120)

So we can't reason well about this. I mean, we can reason well by looking

Robin Hanson (3:22:25.200)

at the past trends. I would say the past trend is roughly your best guess for the future.

Robin Hanson (3:22:30.000)

No, but if I look back at the things that might've looked like revolutions in the 70s and 80s and 90s,

Robin Hanson (3:22:37.280)

they are less like the revolutions that appear to be happening now, or the capacity of revolution

Robin Hanson (3:22:43.840)

that appear to be there now. First of all, there's a lot more money to be made. So there's a lot more

Robin Hanson (3:22:49.520)

incentive for markets to do a lot of kind of innovation, it seems like in the AI space.

Lex Fridman (3:22:54.640)

But then again, there's a history of winters and summers and so on.

Lex Fridman (3:22:58.560)

So maybe we're just like riding a nice wave right now.

Robin Hanson (3:23:00.960)

One of the biggest issues is the difference between impressive demos and commercial value.

Lex Fridman (3:23:05.760)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (3:23:06.480)

So we often through the history of AI, we saw very impressive demos

Lex Fridman (3:23:10.160)

that never really translated much into commercial value.

Robin Hanson (3:23:12.880)

Somebody who works on and cares about autonomous and semi autonomous vehicles,

Lex Fridman (3:23:17.120)

tell me about it. And there again, we return to the number of Elon Musk's per earth per year

Robin Hanson (3:23:24.800)

generated. That's the M. Coincidentally, same initials as the M.

Robin Hanson (3:23:31.440)

Very suspicious, very suspicious. We're going to have to look into that. All right. Two more fields

Robin Hanson (3:23:37.840)

that I would like to force and twist your arm to look for view quakes and for beautiful ideas,

Robin Hanson (3:23:43.040)

economics. What is a beautiful idea to you about economics? You mentioned a lot of them.

Robin Hanson (3:23:53.120)

Sure. So as you said before, there's going to be the first view cake most people encounter that

Robin Hanson (3:23:58.640)

makes the biggest difference on average in the world, because that's the only thing most people

Robin Hanson (3:24:02.880)

ever see is the first one. And so with AI, the first one is just how big the problem is. But

Robin Hanson (3:24:10.800)

once you get past that, you'll find others. Certainly for economics, the first one is just

Robin Hanson (3:24:16.000)

the power of markets. You might have thought it was just really hard to figure out how to optimize

Robin Hanson (3:24:22.640)

in a big, complicated space. And markets just do a good first pass for an awful lot of stuff.

Lex Fridman (3:24:29.040)

And they are really quite robust and powerful. And that's just quite the view quake, where you just

Robin Hanson (3:24:35.520)

say, if you want to get in the ballpark, just let a market handle it and step back. And that's true

Robin Hanson (3:24:43.440)

for a wide range of things. It's not true for everything, but it's a very good first approximation.

Robin Hanson (3:24:48.640)

Most people's intuitions for how they should limit markets are actually messing them up.

Robin Hanson (3:24:53.680)

They're that good in sense. Most people, when you go, I don't know if we want to trust that.

Robin Hanson (3:24:57.440)

Well, you should be trusting that. What are markets? Just a couple of words. So the idea

Robin Hanson (3:25:07.280)

is if people want something, then let other companies form to try to supply that thing.

Robin Hanson (3:25:12.480)

Let those people pay for their cost of whatever they're making and try to offer that product

Robin Hanson (3:25:16.960)

to those people. Let many such firms enter that industry and let the customers decide

Robin Hanson (3:25:22.320)

which ones they want. And if the firm goes out of business, let it go bankrupt and let other

Robin Hanson (3:25:26.320)

people invest in whichever ventures they want to try to attract customers to their version

Lex Fridman (3:25:30.480)

of the product. And that just works for a wide range of products and services.

Lex Fridman (3:25:34.320)

And through all of this, there's a free exchange of information too.

Lex Fridman (3:25:37.760)

There's a hope that there's no manipulation of information and so on.

Robin Hanson (3:25:43.280)

Even when those things happen, still just the simple market solution is usually better

Lex Fridman (3:25:48.000)

than the things you'll try to do to fix it.

Robin Hanson (3:25:49.680)

Than the alternative.

Robin Hanson (3:25:50.560)

That's a view, Craig. It's surprising. It's not what you would have initially thought.

Robin Hanson (3:25:55.040)

That's one of the great, I guess, inventions of human civilization that trust the markets.

Robin Hanson (3:26:02.240)

Now, another view, Craig, that I learned in my research that's not all of economics,

Lex Fridman (3:26:05.840)

but something more specialized is the rationality of disagreement. That is,

Robin Hanson (3:26:11.040)

basically people who are trying to believe what's true in a complicated situation would not actually

Robin Hanson (3:26:16.320)

disagree. And of course, humans disagree all the time. So it was quite the striking fact for me to

Robin Hanson (3:26:22.080)

learn in grad school that actually rational agents would not knowingly disagree. And so that makes

Robin Hanson (3:26:28.960)

disagreement more puzzling and it makes you less willing to disagree.

Lex Fridman (3:26:35.520)

Humans are, to some degree, rational and are able to...

Robin Hanson (3:26:40.480)

Their priorities are different than just figuring out the truth.

Lex Fridman (3:26:43.840)

Are different than just figuring out the truth.

Robin Hanson (3:26:48.720)

Which might not be the same as being irrational.

Lex Fridman (3:26:52.160)

That's another tangent that could take an hour.

Robin Hanson (3:26:56.480)

In the space of human affairs, political science, what is a beautiful, foundational,

Lex Fridman (3:27:04.480)

interesting idea to you, a view, Craig, in the space of political science?

Robin Hanson (3:27:08.160)

It's the main thing that goes wrong in politics is people not agreeing on what the best thing to do is.

Lex Fridman (3:27:19.120)

That's a wrong thing.

Lex Fridman (3:27:20.560)

So that's what goes wrong. That is where you say, what's fundamentally behind most

Robin Hanson (3:27:24.160)

political failures? It's that people are ignorant of what the consequences of policy is.

Lex Fridman (3:27:30.480)

And that's surprising because it's actually feasible to solve that problem,

Lex Fridman (3:27:34.560)

which we aren't solving.

Lex Fridman (3:27:35.680)

So it's a bug, not a feature that there's an inability to arrive at a consensus.

Lex Fridman (3:27:43.040)

So most political systems, if everybody looked to some authority, say, on a question and that

Robin Hanson (3:27:47.840)

authority told them the answer, then most political systems are capable of just doing that thing.

Lex Fridman (3:27:55.200)

That is. And so it's the failure to have trustworthy authorities

Robin Hanson (3:28:00.000)

that is sort of the underlying failure behind most political failure.

Robin Hanson (3:28:04.400)

We invade Iraq, say, when we don't have an authority to tell us that's a really stupid

Robin Hanson (3:28:09.760)

thing to do. And it is possible to create more informative trustworthy authorities.

Robin Hanson (3:28:17.920)

That's a remarkable fact about the world of institutions that we could do that, but we aren't.

Robin Hanson (3:28:24.640)

Yeah, that's surprising. We could and we aren't.

Robin Hanson (3:28:28.000)

Right. Another big view, Craig, about politics is from the elephant in the brain that most people,

Robin Hanson (3:28:31.920)

when they're interacting with politics, they say they want to make the world better,

Robin Hanson (3:28:35.760)

they make their city better, their country better, and that's not their priority.

Lex Fridman (3:28:39.280)

What is it?

Robin Hanson (3:28:40.240)

They want to show loyalty to their allies. They want to show their people they're on their side,

Robin Hanson (3:28:44.560)

yes. Or their various tribes they're in, that's their primary priority and they do accomplish that.

Lex Fridman (3:28:51.360)

Yeah. And the tribes are usually color coded, conveniently enough.

Lex Fridman (3:28:55.120)

What would you say, you know, it's the Churchill question. Democracy is the crappiest form of

Robin Hanson (3:29:01.280)

government, but it's the best one we got. What's the best form of government for this, our 7 billion

Robin Hanson (3:29:08.560)

human civilization and the maybe as we get farther and further. You mentioned a lot of stuff

Robin Hanson (3:29:14.960)

that's fascinating about human history as we become more forager like and looking out beyond

Robin Hanson (3:29:21.200)

what's the best form of government in the next 50, 100 years as we become a multi planetary species.

Robin Hanson (3:29:26.080)

So, the key failing is that we have existing political institutions and related institutions

Robin Hanson (3:29:33.840)

like media institutions and other authority institutions, and these institutions sit in

Robin Hanson (3:29:39.600)

a vast space of possible institutions. And the key failing, we're just not exploring that space.

Lex Fridman (3:29:44.080)

And the key failing, we're just not exploring that space. So, I have made my proposals in that space,

Lex Fridman (3:29:50.400)

and I think I can identify many promising solutions. And many other people have made many

Robin Hanson (3:29:54.880)

other promising proposals in that space. But the key thing is we're just not pursuing those

Robin Hanson (3:29:59.040)

proposals. We're not trying them out on small scales, we're not doing tests, we're not exploring

Robin Hanson (3:30:04.080)

the space of these options. That is the key thing we're failing to do. And if we did that, I am

Robin Hanson (3:30:10.320)

confident we would find much better institutions than one we're using now, but we would have to

Robin Hanson (3:30:14.800)

actually try. So, a lot of those topics, I do hope we get a chance to talk again. You're a fascinating

Robin Hanson (3:30:23.040)

human being. So, I'm skipping a lot of tangents on purpose that I would love to take. You're such a

Robin Hanson (3:30:28.400)

brilliant person on so many different topics. Let me take a stroll into the deep human psyche of

Lex Fridman (3:30:40.640)

Robin Hansen himself. So, first... May not be that deep.

Robin Hanson (3:30:48.320)

I might just be all on the surface. What you see is what you get. There might not be much hiding

Robin Hanson (3:30:51.760)

behind it. Some of the fun is on the surface. I actually think this is true of many of the most

Robin Hanson (3:30:58.960)

successful, most interesting people you see in the world. That is, they have put so much effort

Robin Hanson (3:31:04.640)

into the surface that they've constructed. And that's where they put all their energy. Somebody

Robin Hanson (3:31:10.160)

might be a statesman or an actor or something else, and people want to interview them and they

Robin Hanson (3:31:14.640)

want to say, what are you behind the scenes? What do you do in your free time? Those people don't

Robin Hanson (3:31:18.800)

have free time. They don't have another life behind the scenes. They put all their energy into

Robin Hanson (3:31:24.000)

that surface, the one we admire, the one we're fascinated by. And they kind of have to make up

Robin Hanson (3:31:28.560)

the stuff behind the scenes to supply it for you, but it's not really there. Well, there's several

Robin Hanson (3:31:33.520)

ways of phrasing that. So, one of it is authenticity, which is if you become the thing you are on the

Robin Hanson (3:31:41.360)

surface, if the depths mirror the surface, then that's what authenticity is. You're not hiding

Robin Hanson (3:31:48.160)

something. You're not concealing something. To push back on the idea of actors, they actually have

Robin Hanson (3:31:52.800)

often a manufactured surface that they put on and they try on different masks and the depths are

Robin Hanson (3:32:00.000)

very different from the surface. And that's actually what makes them very not interesting

Robin Hanson (3:32:03.680)

to interview. If you are an actor who actually lives the role that you play, so like, I don't

Robin Hanson (3:32:13.200)

know, Clint Eastwood type character who clearly represents the cowboy, like at least rhymes or

Robin Hanson (3:32:20.800)

echoes the person you play on the surface, that's authenticity. Some people are typecasts and they

Robin Hanson (3:32:26.080)

have basically one persona they play in all of their movies and TV shows. And so those people,

Robin Hanson (3:32:30.480)

it probably is the actual persona that they are, or it has become that over time. Clint Eastwood

Robin Hanson (3:32:37.120)

would be one. I think of Tom Hanks as an ever. I think they just always play the same person.

Lex Fridman (3:32:40.880)

And you and I are just both surface players. You're the fun, brilliant thinker and I am the

Robin Hanson (3:32:49.200)

suit wearing idiot full of silly questions. All right. That said, let's put on your wise

Robin Hanson (3:33:01.520)

sage hat and ask you, what advice would you give to young people today in high school and college

Robin Hanson (3:33:07.200)

about life, about how to live a successful life in career or just in general that they can be proud

Robin Hanson (3:33:15.280)

of? Most young people, when they actually ask you that question, what they usually mean is how can

Robin Hanson (3:33:22.400)

I be successful by usual standards? I'm not very good at giving advice about that because that's

Robin Hanson (3:33:28.320)

not how I tried to live my life. So I would more flip it around and say, you live in a rich society

Lex Fridman (3:33:36.560)

and you will have a long life. You have many resources available to you. Whatever career you

Robin Hanson (3:33:44.480)

take, you'll have plenty of time to make progress on something else. Yes, it might be better if you

Robin Hanson (3:33:50.720)

find a way to combine your career and your interests in a way that gives you more time

Lex Fridman (3:33:54.800)

and energy, but there are often big compromises there as well. So if you have a passion about some

Robin Hanson (3:34:00.560)

topic or some thing that you think just is worth pursuing, you can just do it. You don't need other

Robin Hanson (3:34:05.760)

people's approval. And you can just start doing whatever it is you think it's worth doing. It

Robin Hanson (3:34:12.480)

might take you decades, but decades are enough to make enormous progress on most all interesting

Robin Hanson (3:34:17.280)

things. And don't worry about the commitment of it. I mean, that's a lot of what people worry

Robin Hanson (3:34:21.840)

about is, well, there's so many options. And if I choose a thing and I stick with it, I sacrifice

Robin Hanson (3:34:27.520)

all the other paths I could have taken. So I switched my career at the age of 34 with two

Robin Hanson (3:34:32.640)

kids, age zero and two, went back to grad school in social science after being a research software

Robin Hanson (3:34:39.360)

engineer. So it's quite possible to change your mind later in life.

Lex Fridman (3:34:45.120)

How can you have an age of zero?

Robin Hanson (3:34:48.560)

Less than one.

Lex Fridman (3:34:50.880)

Okay. Oh, you index was zero. I got it. Okay.

Robin Hanson (3:34:55.120)

Right. People also ask what to read and I say, textbooks. Until you've read lots of textbooks

Robin Hanson (3:35:02.000)

or maybe review articles, I'm not so sure you should be reading blog posts and Twitter feeds

Lex Fridman (3:35:08.880)

and even podcasts. I would say at the beginning, this is our best, humanity's best summary of how

Robin Hanson (3:35:16.080)

to learn things is crammed into textbooks. Especially the ones on like introduction to

Robin Hanson (3:35:21.760)

biology, introduction to everything. Just read all the algorithms, read as many textbooks as

Robin Hanson (3:35:26.720)

you can stomach. And then maybe if you want to know more about a subject, find review articles.

Robin Hanson (3:35:30.480)

Right. You don't need to read the latest stuff for most topics.

Lex Fridman (3:35:33.520)

Yeah. And actually textbooks often have the prettiest pictures.

Robin Hanson (3:35:37.120)

There you go.

Lex Fridman (3:35:37.680)

And depending on the field, if it's technical, then doing the homework problems at the end,

Robin Hanson (3:35:42.400)

it's actually extremely, extremely useful. Extremely powerful way to understand something

Robin Hanson (3:35:47.360)

if you allow it. I actually think of like high school and college, which you kind of remind me

Robin Hanson (3:35:54.000)

of, people don't often think of it that way, but you will almost not again get an opportunity

Robin Hanson (3:36:02.000)

to spend the time with a fundamental subject and like, and everybody's forcing you, like

Robin Hanson (3:36:08.560)

everybody wants you to do it. And like, you'll never get that chance again to sit there,

Robin Hanson (3:36:14.640)

even though it's outside of your interest, biology. Like in high school, I took AP biology,

Robin Hanson (3:36:19.280)

AP chemistry. I'm thinking of subjects I never again really visited seriously. And it was so

Robin Hanson (3:36:28.000)

nice to be forced into anatomy and physiology, to be forced into that world, to stay with it,

Robin Hanson (3:36:35.040)

to look at the pretty pictures, to certain moments to actually for a moment, enjoy the beauty of

Robin Hanson (3:36:40.800)

these, of like how a cell works and all those kinds of things. And you're somehow that stays

Robin Hanson (3:36:46.240)

like the ripples of that fascination that stays with you, even if you never do those,

Lex Fridman (3:36:51.040)

even if you never utilize those learnings in your actual work.

Robin Hanson (3:36:56.720)

A common problem, at least of many young people I meet is that they're like feeling

Robin Hanson (3:37:01.600)

idealistic and altruistic, but in a rush. So, you know, the usual human tradition that goes back,

Robin Hanson (3:37:09.200)

you know, hundreds of thousands of years is that people's productivity rises with time and maybe

Robin Hanson (3:37:13.920)

peaks around the age of 40 or 50. The age of 40, 50 is when you will be having the highest income,

Robin Hanson (3:37:19.520)

you'll have the most contacts, you will sort of be wise about how the world works.

Robin Hanson (3:37:25.680)

Expect to have your biggest impact then. Before then, you can have impacts, but you're also mainly

Robin Hanson (3:37:31.280)

building up your resources and abilities. That's the usual human trajectory. Expect that to be

Robin Hanson (3:37:38.320)

true of you too. Don't be in such a rush to like accomplish enormous things at the age of 18 or

Robin Hanson (3:37:43.120)

whatever. I mean, you might as well practice trying to do things, but that's mostly about

Robin Hanson (3:37:47.680)

learning how to do things by practicing. There's a lot of things you can't do unless you just

Robin Hanson (3:37:50.720)

keep trying them. And when all else fails, try to maximize the number of offspring,

Robin Hanson (3:37:56.640)

however way you can. That's certainly something I've neglected. I would tell my younger version

Robin Hanson (3:38:01.920)

of myself, try to have more descendants. Yes, absolutely. It matters more than I gave,

Robin Hanson (3:38:09.200)

I realized at the time. Both in terms of making copies of yourself in mutated form

Lex Fridman (3:38:18.320)

and just the joy of raising them. Sure. I mean, the meaning even, you know, so in the literature on

Robin Hanson (3:38:28.160)

the value people get out of life, there's a key distinction between happiness and meaning.

Lex Fridman (3:38:32.320)

So happiness is how do you feel right now about right now and meaning is how do you feel about

Robin Hanson (3:38:37.680)

your whole life? And, you know, many things that produce happiness don't produce meaning as

Robin Hanson (3:38:44.240)

reliably. And if you have to choose between them, you'd rather have meaning. And meaning is more

Robin Hanson (3:38:51.680)

goes along with sacrificing happiness sometimes. And children are an example of that. You get a lot

Robin Hanson (3:38:57.120)

more meaning out of children, even if they're a lot more work. What do you think kids, children

Robin Hanson (3:39:05.520)

are so magical, like raising kids? I would love to have kids. And whenever I work with robots,

Robin Hanson (3:39:15.920)

there's some of the same magic when there's an entity that comes to life. And in that case,

Robin Hanson (3:39:21.680)

I'm not trying to draw too many parallels, but there is some echo to it, which is when you

Robin Hanson (3:39:27.920)

program a robot, there's some aspect of your intellect that is now instilled in this other

Robin Hanson (3:39:33.840)

moving being that's kind of magical. Well, why do you think that's magical? And you said happiness

Lex Fridman (3:39:40.240)

and meaning as opposed to a short. Why is it meaningful? It's overdetermined. Like I can give

Robin Hanson (3:39:49.200)

you several different reasons, all of which is sufficient. And so the question is, we don't know

Robin Hanson (3:39:53.200)

which ones are the correct reasons. It's overdetermined. Look it up. So, you know, I meet a

Robin Hanson (3:39:59.840)

lot of people interested in the future, interested in thinking about the future. They're thinking

Robin Hanson (3:40:03.360)

about how can I influence the future? But overwhelmingly in history so far, the main way

Robin Hanson (3:40:08.960)

people have influenced the future is by having children, overwhelmingly. And that's just not an

Robin Hanson (3:40:15.920)

incidental fact. You are built for that. That is, you're the sequence of thousands of generations,

Robin Hanson (3:40:22.480)

each of which successfully had a descendant. And that affected who you are. You just have to expect

Lex Fridman (3:40:28.880)

and it's true that who you are is built to be, you know, expect to have a child, to want to have a

Robin Hanson (3:40:36.800)

child, to have that be a natural and meaningful interaction for you. And it's just true. It's just

Robin Hanson (3:40:41.920)

one of those things you just should have expected and it's not a surprise. Well, to push back and

Robin Hanson (3:40:48.080)

sort of in terms of influencing the future, as we get more and more technology, more and more of us

Robin Hanson (3:40:54.960)

are able to influence the future in all kinds of other ways, right? Being a teacher, educator. Even

Robin Hanson (3:41:00.240)

so, though, still most of our influence in the future has probably happened being kids, even

Robin Hanson (3:41:05.440)

though we've accumulated more ways, other ways to do it. You mean at scale. I guess the depth of

Robin Hanson (3:41:11.120)

influence, like really how much of much effort, how much of yourself you really put into another human

Robin Hanson (3:41:15.920)

being. Do you mean both the raising of a kid or you mean raw genetic information? Well, both, but

Robin Hanson (3:41:24.480)

raw genetics is probably more than half of it. More than half. More than half. Even in this modern

Robin Hanson (3:41:30.720)

world? Yeah. Genetics. Let me ask some dark, difficult questions, if I might. Let's take a

Robin Hanson (3:41:40.080)

stroll into that place that may or may not exist, according to you. What's the darkest place you've

Lex Fridman (3:41:48.080)

ever gone to in your mind, in your life, a dark time, a challenging time in your life that you had to overcome?

Robin Hanson (3:41:58.160)

You know, probably just feeling strongly rejected. And so I've been, I'm apparently somewhat

Robin Hanson (3:42:06.160)

emotionally scarred by just being very rejection averse, which must have happened because

Robin Hanson (3:42:11.360)

some rejections were just very scarring. At a scale in what kinds of communities? On the

Robin Hanson (3:42:18.400)

individual scale? I mean, lots of different scales, yeah. All the different, many different scales. Still

Robin Hanson (3:42:24.720)

that rejection stings. Hold on a second, but you are a contrarian thinker. You challenge the

Robin Hanson (3:42:33.360)

norms. Why, if you were scarred by rejection, why welcome it in so many ways at a much

Robin Hanson (3:42:43.360)

larger scale, constantly with your ideas? It could be that I'm just stupid, or that I've just categorized

Robin Hanson (3:42:50.560)

them differently than I should or something. You know, the most rejection that I've faced hasn't been

Robin Hanson (3:42:58.160)

because of my intellectual ideas. So the intellectual ideas haven't been the thing

Robin Hanson (3:43:06.000)

to risk the rejection. The one that, the things that challenge your mind taking you to a dark

Robin Hanson (3:43:14.960)

place are the more psychological rejections. So. Well, you just asked me, you know, what took me to a

Robin Hanson (3:43:21.040)

dark place. You didn't specify it as sort of an intellectual dark place, I guess. Yeah, I just

Robin Hanson (3:43:25.600)

meant like what? So intellectual is disjoint or at least at a more surface level than something

Robin Hanson (3:43:33.760)

emotional? Yeah, I would just think, you know, there are times in your life when, you know,

Robin Hanson (3:43:38.560)

you're just in a dark place and that can have many different causes. And most, you know, most

Robin Hanson (3:43:43.520)

intellectuals are still just people and most of the things that will affect them are the kinds of

Robin Hanson (3:43:47.840)

things that affect people. They aren't that different necessarily. I mean, that's going to be true for,

Robin Hanson (3:43:52.240)

like, I presume most basketball players are still just people. If you ask them what was the worst

Robin Hanson (3:43:55.920)

part of their life, it's going to be this kind of thing that was the worst part of life for most

Robin Hanson (3:43:59.760)

people. So rejection early in life? Yeah, I think, I mean, not in grade school probably, but, you know,

Robin Hanson (3:44:06.160)

yeah, sort of, you know, being a young nerdy guy and feeling, you know, not in much demand or interest

Robin Hanson (3:44:13.760)

or, you know, later on, lots of different kinds of rejection. But yeah, but I think that's, you know,

Robin Hanson (3:44:22.800)

most of us like to pretend we don't that much need other people. We don't care what they think.

Robin Hanson (3:44:26.960)

I know it's a common sort of stance if somebody rejects you or something, I didn't care about them

Robin Hanson (3:44:30.720)

anyway. I, you know, didn't, but I think to be honest, people really do care. Yeah, we do seek

Lex Fridman (3:44:35.920)

that connection, that love. What do you think is the role of love in the human condition?

Robin Hanson (3:44:40.480)

Um, opacity, in part. That is, love is one of those things where we know at some level it's

Robin Hanson (3:44:53.440)

important to us, but it's not very clearly shown to us exactly how or why or in what ways.

Robin Hanson (3:45:00.480)

There are some kinds of things we want where we can just clearly see that we want and why that we

Robin Hanson (3:45:03.760)

want it, right? We know when we're thirsty, and we know why we were thirsty, and we know what to

Robin Hanson (3:45:07.280)

do about being thirsty, and we know when it's over that we're no longer thirsty. Love isn't like that.

Robin Hanson (3:45:14.480)

It's like, what do we seek from this? We're drawn to it, but we do not understand why

Robin Hanson (3:45:19.920)

we're drawn exactly. Because it's not just affection, because if it was just affection,

Robin Hanson (3:45:25.040)

we don't seem to be drawn to pure affection. We don't seem to be drawn to somebody who's like a

Robin Hanson (3:45:32.160)

servant. We don't seem to be necessarily drawn to somebody that satisfies all your needs or something

Robin Hanson (3:45:37.520)

like that. So it's clearly something we want or need, but we're not exactly very clear about it,

Lex Fridman (3:45:43.520)

and that is kind of important to it. So I've also noticed there are some kinds of things

Robin Hanson (3:45:48.080)

you can't imagine very well. So if you imagine a situation, there's some aspects of the situation

Robin Hanson (3:45:53.040)

that you can clearly, you can imagine it being bright or dim, you can imagine it being windy,

Robin Hanson (3:45:56.960)

or you can imagine it being hot or cold. But there's some aspects about your emotional stance

Robin Hanson (3:46:02.240)

in a situation that's actually just hard to imagine or even remember. You can often remember

Robin Hanson (3:46:08.240)

an emotion only when you're in a similar sort of emotion situation, and otherwise, you just can't

Robin Hanson (3:46:12.720)

bring the emotion to your mind, and you can't even imagine it, right? So there's certain kinds of

Robin Hanson (3:46:19.280)

emotions you can have, and when you're in that emotion, you can know that you have it, and you

Robin Hanson (3:46:22.480)

can have a name, and it's associated. But later on, I tell you, remember joy, and it doesn't come to

Robin Hanson (3:46:28.560)

mind. I'm not able to replay it. Right. And it's the sort of reason why we have, one of the reasons

Robin Hanson (3:46:33.760)

that pushes us to re consume it and reproduce it is that we can't reimagine it. Well, it's interesting

Robin Hanson (3:46:41.200)

because there's a Daniel Kahneman type of thing of reliving memories, because I'm able to summon

Robin Hanson (3:46:47.840)

some aspect of that emotion, again, by thinking of that situation from which that emotion came.

Robin Hanson (3:46:53.760)

Right. So like a certain song, you can listen to it, and you can feel the same way you felt the

Robin Hanson (3:46:59.840)

first time you remember that song associated with it. Right. So you need to remember that situation

Robin Hanson (3:47:03.760)

in some sort of complete package. Yes. You can't just take one part off of it, and then if you get

Robin Hanson (3:47:08.400)

the whole package again, if you remember the whole feeling. Yes. Or some fundamental aspect of that

Robin Hanson (3:47:13.440)

whole experience that arouse from which the feeling arose. And actually, the feeling is probably

Robin Hanson (3:47:18.480)

different in some way. It could be more pleasant or less pleasant than the feeling you felt

Robin Hanson (3:47:23.040)

originally, and that morphs over time every time you replay that memory. It is interesting. You're

Robin Hanson (3:47:28.160)

not able to replay the feeling perfectly. You don't remember the feeling. You remember the facts of the

Robin Hanson (3:47:33.840)

events. So there's a sense of which over time we expand our vocabulary as a community of language,

Lex Fridman (3:47:39.200)

and that allows us to sort of have more feelings and know that we are feeling them. Because you can

Robin Hanson (3:47:43.920)

have a feeling but not have a word for it, and then you don't know how to categorize it or even

Lex Fridman (3:47:47.840)

what it is and whether it's the same as something else. But once you have a word for it, you can

Robin Hanson (3:47:52.720)

sort of pull it together more easily. And so I think over time we are having a richer palette of

Lex Fridman (3:47:58.640)

feelings because we have more words for them. What has been a painful loss in your life?

Robin Hanson (3:48:05.520)

Maybe somebody or something that's no longer in your life, but played an important part of your life.

Lex Fridman (3:48:12.640)

Youth?

Robin Hanson (3:48:14.720)

That's a concept. No, it has to be...

Lex Fridman (3:48:16.800)

I mean, but I was once younger. I had health and I had vitality. I was

Robin Hanson (3:48:20.720)

insomere. I mean, you know, I've lost that over time.

Lex Fridman (3:48:22.960)

Do you see that as a different person? Maybe you've lost that person.

Robin Hanson (3:48:26.800)

Yes, absolutely. I'm a different person than I was when I was younger, and I don't even remember

Robin Hanson (3:48:32.080)

exactly what he was. So I don't remember as many things from the past as many people do. So in

Robin Hanson (3:48:36.800)

some sense, I've just lost a lot of my history by not remembering it. And I'm not that person

Lex Fridman (3:48:42.560)

anymore. That person is gone and I don't have any of their abilities.

Lex Fridman (3:48:45.120)

Is it a painful loss, though?

Lex Fridman (3:48:46.960)

Yeah.

Robin Hanson (3:48:47.440)

Or is it a... Why is it painful? Because you're wiser.

Lex Fridman (3:48:54.640)

There's so many things that are beneficial to getting older.

Robin Hanson (3:48:57.840)

Right. But I just was this person and I felt assured that I could continue to be that person.

Lex Fridman (3:49:06.240)

And you're no longer that person.

Lex Fridman (3:49:07.680)

And he's gone. And I'm not him anymore. And he died without fanfare or a funeral.

Lex Fridman (3:49:14.240)

And that the person you are today talking to me, that person will be changed, too.

Robin Hanson (3:49:20.640)

Yes. And maybe in 20 years, he won't be there anymore.

Lex Fridman (3:49:24.320)

And the future person, we'll look back. The future version of you will...

Robin Hanson (3:49:30.560)

For Ems, this will be less of a problem. For Ems, they would be able to save an archived

Robin Hanson (3:49:34.720)

copy of themselves at each different age. And they could turn it on periodically and go back

Lex Fridman (3:49:39.440)

and talk to it.

Lex Fridman (3:49:40.000)

To replay. You think some of that will be... So with emulated minds, with Ems,

Robin Hanson (3:49:46.880)

there's a digital cloning that happens. And do you think that makes you less special if you're

Robin Hanson (3:50:00.000)

clonable? Does that make you the experience of life, the experience of a moment, the scarcity

Robin Hanson (3:50:10.160)

of that moment, the scarcity of that experience, isn't that a fundamental part of what makes

Lex Fridman (3:50:14.640)

that experience so delicious, so rich of feeling?

Robin Hanson (3:50:18.160)

I think if you think of a song that lots of people listen to that are copies all over the

Lex Fridman (3:50:22.480)

world, we're going to call that a more special song.

Robin Hanson (3:50:26.080)

Yeah. Yeah.

Lex Fridman (3:50:32.400)

So there's a perspective on copying and cloning where you're just scaling happiness versus

Robin Hanson (3:50:39.200)

degrading it.

Robin Hanson (3:50:40.160)

I mean, each copy of a song is less special if there are many copies, but the song itself is

Robin Hanson (3:50:46.800)

more special if there are many copies.

Robin Hanson (3:50:48.480)

In a mass, right, you're actually spreading the happiness even if it diminishes over a

Robin Hanson (3:50:55.120)

large number of people at scale and that increases the overall happiness in the world.

Lex Fridman (3:50:59.440)

And then you're able to do that with multiple songs.

Lex Fridman (3:51:02.160)

Is a person who has an identical twin more or less special?

Robin Hanson (3:51:06.800)

Well, the problem with identical twins is, you know, it's like just two with M's.

Robin Hanson (3:51:16.880)

Right, but two is different than one.

Lex Fridman (3:51:18.480)

So I think an identical twin's life is richer for having this other identical twin, somebody

Robin Hanson (3:51:24.560)

who understands them better than anybody else can.

Robin Hanson (3:51:27.760)

From the point of view of an identical twin, I think they have a richer life for being

Robin Hanson (3:51:32.080)

part of this couple, each of which is very similar.

Robin Hanson (3:51:34.560)

Now, if you said, will the world, you know, if we lose one of the identical twins, will

Lex Fridman (3:51:38.960)

the world miss it as much because you've got the other one and they're pretty similar?

Robin Hanson (3:51:42.240)

Maybe from the rest of the world's point of view, they suffer less of a loss when they

Robin Hanson (3:51:46.560)

lose one of the identical twins.

Lex Fridman (3:51:48.080)

But from the point of view of the identical twin themselves, their life is enriched by

Robin Hanson (3:51:52.400)

having a twin.

Lex Fridman (3:51:53.520)

See, but the identical twin copying happens at the place of birth.

Robin Hanson (3:51:58.240)

It's different than copying after you've done some of the environment, like the nurture

Lex Fridman (3:52:05.600)

at the teenage or in the 20s after going to college.

Robin Hanson (3:52:08.640)

Yes, that'll be an interesting thing for M's to find out all the different ways that

Robin Hanson (3:52:11.920)

they can have different relationships to different people who have different degrees of similarity

Robin Hanson (3:52:16.080)

to them in time.

Lex Fridman (3:52:17.760)

Yeah, yeah, man.

Lex Fridman (3:52:23.920)

But it seems like a rich space to explore and I don't feel sorry for them.

Lex Fridman (3:52:26.880)

This sounds like an interesting world to live in.

Lex Fridman (3:52:29.200)

And there could be some ethical conundrums there.

Lex Fridman (3:52:31.920)

There will be many new choices to make that they don't make now.

Robin Hanson (3:52:35.200)

So, and I discussed that in the book Age of M.

Robin Hanson (3:52:38.560)

Like, say you have a lover and you make a copy of yourself, but the lover doesn't make

Robin Hanson (3:52:43.040)

a copy.

Lex Fridman (3:52:43.440)

Well now, which one of you or are both still related to the lover?

Robin Hanson (3:52:48.880)

Socially entitled to show up.

Robin Hanson (3:52:52.560)

Yes, so you'll have to make choices then when you split yourself, which of you inherit

Robin Hanson (3:52:58.800)

which unique things.

Lex Fridman (3:53:01.760)

Yeah, and of course there'll be an equivalent increase in lawyers.

Robin Hanson (3:53:08.720)

Well, I guess you can clone the lawyers to help manage some of these negotiations of

Lex Fridman (3:53:14.800)

how to split property.

Lex Fridman (3:53:16.160)

The nature of owning, I mean, property is connected to individuals, right?

Robin Hanson (3:53:22.080)

You only really need lawyers for this with an inefficient, awkward law that is not very

Robin Hanson (3:53:26.320)

transparent and able to do things.

Robin Hanson (3:53:28.320)

So, you know, for example, an operating system of a computer is a law for that computer.

Robin Hanson (3:53:33.520)

When the operating system is simple and clean, you don't need to hire a lawyer to make a

Lex Fridman (3:53:37.920)

key choice with the operating system.

Robin Hanson (3:53:38.800)

You don't need a human in the loop.

Lex Fridman (3:53:40.240)

You just make a choice, right?

Lex Fridman (3:53:42.800)

So ideally we want a legal system that makes the common choices easy and not require much

Lex Fridman (3:53:48.640)

overhead.

Lex Fridman (3:53:49.440)

And that's the digitization of things further enables that.

Lex Fridman (3:53:56.000)

So the loss of a younger self, what about the loss of your life overall?

Lex Fridman (3:54:01.280)

Do you ponder your death, your mortality?

Lex Fridman (3:54:03.760)

Are you afraid of it?

Robin Hanson (3:54:05.120)

I am a cryonics customer.

Lex Fridman (3:54:06.960)

That's what this little tag around my deck says.

Robin Hanson (3:54:09.520)

It says that if you find me in a medical situation, you should call these people to enable the

Lex Fridman (3:54:15.840)

cryonics transfer.

Lex Fridman (3:54:16.960)

So I am taking a long shot chance at living a much longer life.

Lex Fridman (3:54:22.480)

Can you explain what cryonics is?

Lex Fridman (3:54:25.600)

So when medical science gives up on me in this world, instead of burning me or letting

Lex Fridman (3:54:32.800)

worms eat me, they will freeze me or at least freeze my head.

Lex Fridman (3:54:36.960)

And there is damage that happens in the process of freezing the head.

Lex Fridman (3:54:40.400)

But once it's frozen, it won't change for a very long time.

Robin Hanson (3:54:44.240)

Chemically, it'll just be completely exactly the same.

Lex Fridman (3:54:47.520)

So future technology might be able to revive me.

Lex Fridman (3:54:50.960)

And in fact, I would be mainly counting on the brain emulation scenario, which doesn't

Lex Fridman (3:54:55.440)

require reviving my entire biological body.

Robin Hanson (3:54:58.000)

It means I would be in a computer simulation.

Lex Fridman (3:55:02.080)

And so I think I've got at least a 5% shot at that.

Lex Fridman (3:55:06.400)

And that's immortality.

Lex Fridman (3:55:10.320)

But most likely it won't happen.

Lex Fridman (3:55:12.000)

And therefore, I'm sad that it won't happen.

Lex Fridman (3:55:14.960)

Do you think immortality is something that you would like to have?

Robin Hanson (3:55:20.720)

Well, I mean, just like infinity, I mean, you can't know until forever, which means

Lex Fridman (3:55:26.160)

never, right?

Lex Fridman (3:55:26.800)

So all you can really, you know, the better choice is at each moment, do you want to keep

Lex Fridman (3:55:30.800)

going?

Lex Fridman (3:55:31.600)

So I would like at every moment to have the option to keep going.

Robin Hanson (3:55:34.720)

The interesting thing about human experience is that the way you phrase it is exactly right.

Robin Hanson (3:55:45.440)

At every moment, I would like to keep going.

Lex Fridman (3:55:48.720)

But the thing that happens, you know, leave them wanting more of whatever that phrase

Robin Hanson (3:55:58.640)

is, the thing that happens is over time, it's possible for certain experiences to become

Lex Fridman (3:56:04.560)

bland and you become tired of them.

Lex Fridman (3:56:07.840)

And that actually makes life really unpleasant.

Lex Fridman (3:56:13.920)

Sorry, makes that experience really unpleasant.

Lex Fridman (3:56:15.760)

And perhaps you can generalize that to life itself if you have a long enough horizon.

Lex Fridman (3:56:21.280)

And so...

Robin Hanson (3:56:22.000)

Might happen, but might as well wait and find out.

Lex Fridman (3:56:24.560)

But then you're ending on suffering, you know?

Lex Fridman (3:56:28.160)

So in the world of brain emulations, I have more options.

Lex Fridman (3:56:32.800)

You can return yourself.

Robin Hanson (3:56:34.080)

That is, I can make copies of myself, archive copies at various ages.

Lex Fridman (3:56:39.040)

And at a later age, I could decide that I'd rather replace myself with a new copy from

Robin Hanson (3:56:43.440)

a younger age.

Lex Fridman (3:56:44.640)

So does a brain emulation still operate in physical space?

Lex Fridman (3:56:48.800)

So can we do, what do you think about like the metaverse and operating in virtual reality

Lex Fridman (3:56:53.360)

so we can conjure up not just emulate, not just your own brain and body, but the entirety

Lex Fridman (3:57:00.240)

of the environment?

Robin Hanson (3:57:00.880)

Well, most brain emulations will, in fact, most of their time in virtual reality.

Lex Fridman (3:57:06.000)

But they wouldn't think of it as virtual reality.

Lex Fridman (3:57:08.480)

They would just think of it as their usual reality.

Robin Hanson (3:57:11.200)

I mean, the thing to notice, I think, in our world, most of us spend most time indoors.

Lex Fridman (3:57:16.320)

And indoors, we are surrounded by walls covered with paint and floors covered with

Robin Hanson (3:57:21.760)

tile or rugs.

Lex Fridman (3:57:23.600)

Most of our environment is artificial.

Robin Hanson (3:57:26.400)

It's constructed to be convenient for us.

Lex Fridman (3:57:28.560)

It's not the natural world that was there before.

Robin Hanson (3:57:31.200)

A virtual reality is basically just like that.

Lex Fridman (3:57:33.840)

It is the environment that's comfortable and convenient for you.

Lex Fridman (3:57:37.760)

But when it's the right, that environment for you, it's real for you.

Lex Fridman (3:57:41.360)

Just like the room you're in right now most likely is very real for you.

Robin Hanson (3:57:45.040)

You're not focused on the fact that the paint is hiding the actual studs behind the

Lex Fridman (3:57:49.600)

wall and the actual wires and pipes and everything else.

Robin Hanson (3:57:52.880)

The fact that we're hiding that from you doesn't make it fake or unreal.

Lex Fridman (3:57:58.400)

What are the chances that we're actually in the very kind of system that you're describing

Robin Hanson (3:58:04.400)

where the environment and the brain is being emulated and you're just replaying an experience

Lex Fridman (3:58:08.880)

when you first did a podcast with Lex after?

Lex Fridman (3:58:14.960)

And now, the person that originally launched this already did hundreds of podcasts with

Lex Fridman (3:58:19.520)

Lex.

Robin Hanson (3:58:19.760)

This is just the first time and you like this time because there's so much uncertainty.

Lex Fridman (3:58:24.560)

There's nerves.

Robin Hanson (3:58:25.360)

It could have gone any direction.

Lex Fridman (3:58:28.320)

At the moment, we don't have the technical ability to create that emulation.

Lex Fridman (3:58:32.560)

So we'd have to be postulating that in the future we have that ability and then they

Lex Fridman (3:58:37.280)

choose to evaluate this moment now to simulate it.

Robin Hanson (3:58:40.400)

Don't you think we could be in the simulation of that exact experience right now and we

Lex Fridman (3:58:45.520)

wouldn't be able to know?

Lex Fridman (3:58:46.320)

So one scenario would be this never really happened.

Lex Fridman (3:58:51.040)

This only happens as a reconstruction later on.

Robin Hanson (3:58:55.040)

That's different than the scenario that this did happen the first time and now it's happening

Lex Fridman (3:58:58.560)

again as a reconstruction.

Robin Hanson (3:59:00.640)

That second scenario is harder to put together because it requires this coincidence where

Lex Fridman (3:59:06.240)

between the two times we produce the ability to do it.

Lex Fridman (3:59:08.960)

But don't you think replay of memories, poor replay of memories is something that might

Lex Fridman (3:59:18.320)

be a possible thing in the future?

Robin Hanson (3:59:19.600)

You're saying it's harder than conjure up things from scratch.

Lex Fridman (3:59:23.600)

It's certainly possible.

Lex Fridman (3:59:25.040)

So the main way I would think about it is in terms of the demand for simulation versus

Lex Fridman (3:59:29.920)

other kinds of things.

Lex Fridman (3:59:31.120)

So I've given this a lot of thought because I first wrote about this long ago when Bostrom

Robin Hanson (3:59:36.160)

first wrote his papers about simulation argument and I wrote about how to live in a simulation.

Lex Fridman (3:59:42.160)

And so the key issue is the fraction of creatures in the universe that are really experiencing

Lex Fridman (3:59:50.560)

what you appear to be really experiencing relative to the fraction that are experiencing

Robin Hanson (3:59:54.480)

it in a simulation way, i.e., simulated.

Lex Fridman (3:59:57.760)

So then the key parameter is at any one moment in time, creatures at that time, many of them,

Lex Fridman (40:07.520)

and among humans, competitions among individuals and communities and that competition often took

Robin Hanson (40:12.800)

the form of war in the last 10,000 years. Many people now are hoping or even expecting to sort

Robin Hanson (40:20.720)

of suppress and end competition in human affairs. They regulate business competition, they prevent

Robin Hanson (40:28.320)

military competition and that's a future I think a lot of people will like to continue and

Robin Hanson (40:34.880)

strengthen. People will like to have something close to world government or world governance or

Robin Hanson (40:39.280)

at least a world community and they will like to suppress war and many forms of business and

Robin Hanson (40:44.640)

personal competition over the coming centuries. And they may like that so much that they prevent

Robin Hanson (40:51.760)

interstellar colonization which would become the end of that era. That is interstellar colonization

Robin Hanson (40:56.720)

would just return severe competition to human or our descendant affairs and many civilizations may

Robin Hanson (41:03.280)

prefer that and ours may prefer that. But if they choose to allow interstellar colonization,

Robin Hanson (41:08.960)

they will have chosen to allow competition to return with great force. That is, there's really

Robin Hanson (41:13.680)

not much of a way to centrally govern a rapidly expanding sphere of civilization. And so I think

Robin Hanson (41:20.560)

one of the most solid things we can predict about Graviolians is they have accepted competition

Lex Fridman (41:26.640)

and they have internal competition and therefore they have the potential for competition when they

Robin Hanson (41:32.080)

meet each other at the borders. But whether that's military competition is more of an open question.

Lex Fridman (41:37.440)

LW. So military meaning physically destructive, right.

Lex Fridman (41:46.080)

So there's a lot to say there. So one idea that you kind of proposed is progress might be maximized

Robin Hanson (41:55.200)

through competition, through some kind of healthy competition, some definition of healthy. So like

Robin Hanson (42:03.120)

constructive not destructive competition. So like we would likely grab the alien civilizations would

Robin Hanson (42:11.200)

be likely defined by competition because they can expand faster because competition allows

Robin Hanson (42:17.520)

innovation and sort of the battle of ideas.

Robin Hanson (42:19.600)

LW. The way I would take the logic is to say competition just happens if you can't coordinate

Robin Hanson (42:26.160)

to stop it and you probably can't coordinate to stop it in an expanding interstellar way.

Lex Fridman (42:31.920)

LW. So competition is a fundamental force in the universe.

Robin Hanson (42:37.280)

LW. It has been so far and it would be within an expanding Graviolian civilization. But we today

Robin Hanson (42:44.320)

have the chance, many people think and hope, of greatly controlling and limiting competition

Robin Hanson (42:50.000)

within our civilization for a while. And that's an interesting choice whether to allow competition

Lex Fridman (42:57.600)

to sort of regain its full force or whether to suppress and manage it.

Robin Hanson (43:02.960)

LW. Well one of the open questions that has been raised in the past less than 100 years

Robin Hanson (43:13.440)

is whether our desire to lessen the destructive nature of competition or the destructive kind

Robin Hanson (43:20.720)

of competition will be outpaced by the destructive power of our weapons. Sort of if nuclear weapons

Lex Fridman (43:32.000)

and weapons of that kind become more destructive than our desire for peace then all it takes is

Robin Hanson (43:41.840)

one asshole at the party to ruin the party.

Robin Hanson (43:45.040)

LW. It takes one asshole to make a delay, but not that much of a delay on the cosmological

Robin Hanson (43:51.040)

scales we're talking about. So even a vast nuclear war, if it happened here right now on Earth,

Lex Fridman (43:59.520)

it would not kill all humans and it certainly wouldn't kill all life.

Lex Fridman (44:05.200)

And so human civilization would return within 100,000 years.

Lex Fridman (44:09.360)

LW. So all the history of atrocities and if you look at the Black Plague,

Robin Hanson (44:23.280)

which is not human caused atrocities or whatever.

Lex Fridman (44:26.320)

LW. There are a lot of military atrocities in history, absolutely.

Robin Hanson (44:29.440)

LW. In the 20th century. Those are, those challenge us to think about human nature,

Lex Fridman (44:36.480)

but the cosmic scale of time and space, they do not stop the human spirit, essentially.

Robin Hanson (44:44.400)

The humanity goes on through all the atrocities, it goes on.

Lex Fridman (44:48.960)

LW. Most likely.

Robin Hanson (44:50.240)

LW. So even a nuclear war isn't enough to destroy us or to stop our potential from expanding,

Lex Fridman (44:57.280)

but we could institute a regime of global governance that limited competition,

Robin Hanson (45:03.920)

including military and business competition of sorts, and that could prevent our expansion.

Robin Hanson (45:08.880)

LW. Of course, to play devil's advocate, global governance is centralized power,

Robin Hanson (45:20.880)

power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. One of the aspects of competition

Robin Hanson (45:27.760)

that's been very productive is not letting any one person, any one country, any one center of power

Robin Hanson (45:36.800)

become absolutely powerful, because that's another lesson, is it seems to corrupt.

Robin Hanson (45:43.200)

There's something about ego in the human mind that seems to be corrupted by power,

Lex Fridman (45:47.440)

so when you say global governance, that terrifies me more than the possibility of war,

Lex Fridman (45:55.440)

because it's...

Robin Hanson (45:57.920)

LW. I think people will be less terrified than you are right now,

Lex Fridman (46:01.280)

and let me try to paint the picture from their point of view. This isn't my point of view,

Lex Fridman (46:05.440)

but I think it's going to be a widely shared point of view.

Lex Fridman (46:07.920)

LW. Yes. This is two devil's advocates arguing.

Robin Hanson (46:10.160)

LW. Two devils.

Robin Hanson (46:10.800)

LW. Okay. So for the last half century and into the continuing future, we actually have had

Robin Hanson (46:18.560)

a strong elite global community that shares a lot of values and beliefs and has created a lot

Robin Hanson (46:26.720)

of convergence in global policy. So if you look at electromagnetic spectrum or medical experiments

Robin Hanson (46:33.680)

or pandemic policy or nuclear power energy or regulating airplanes or just in a wide range

Robin Hanson (46:40.400)

of area, in fact, the world has very similar regulations and rules everywhere, and it's not

Robin Hanson (46:46.880)

a coincidence because they are part of a world community where people get together at places

Robin Hanson (46:51.680)

like Davos, et cetera, where world elites want to be respected by other world elites, and they

Robin Hanson (46:59.280)

have a convergence of opinion, and that produces something like global governance,

Lex Fridman (47:05.520)

but without a global center. This is what human mobs or communities have done for a long time,

Robin Hanson (47:11.120)

that is, humans can coordinate together on shared behavior without a center by having

Robin Hanson (47:16.080)

gossip and reputation within a community of elites. And that is what we have been doing and

Robin Hanson (47:22.160)

are likely to do a lot more of. So for example, one of the things that's happening, say, with the

Robin Hanson (47:27.680)

war in Ukraine is that this world community of elites has decided that they disapprove of the

Robin Hanson (47:33.360)

Russian invasion and they are coordinating to pull resources together from all around the world in

Robin Hanson (47:38.480)

order to oppose it, and they are proud of that, sharing that opinion in there, and they feel that

Robin Hanson (47:45.520)

they are morally justified in their stance there. And that's the kind of event that actually brings

Robin Hanson (47:53.440)

world elite communities together, where they come together and they push a particular policy and

Robin Hanson (47:59.360)

position that they share and that they achieve successes. And the same sort of passion animates

Robin Hanson (48:04.160)

global elites with respect to, say, global warming or global poverty and other sorts of things. And

Robin Hanson (48:09.600)

they are, in fact, making progress on those sorts of things through shared global community of

Robin Hanson (48:16.320)

elites. And in some sense, they are slowly walking toward global governance, slowly strengthening

Robin Hanson (48:23.120)

various world institutions of governance, but cautiously, carefully watching out for the

Robin Hanson (48:28.560)

possibility of a single power that might corrupt it. I think a lot of people over the coming

Robin Hanson (48:34.240)

centuries will look at that history and like it. It's an interesting thought. And thank you for

Robin Hanson (48:41.440)

playing that devil's advocate there. But I think the elites too easily lose touch of the morals

Robin Hanson (48:52.640)

that the best of human nature and power corrupts. Sure, but their view is the one that determines

Lex Fridman (48:59.600)

what happens. Their view may still end up there, even if you or I might criticize it from that

Robin Hanson (49:06.320)

point of view. So from a perspective of minimizing human suffering, elites can use topics of the war

Robin Hanson (49:14.000)

in Ukraine and climate change and all of those things to sell an idea to the world. And with

Robin Hanson (49:25.520)

disregard to the amount of suffering it causes, their actual actions. So like you can tell all

Robin Hanson (49:33.040)

kinds of narratives. That's the way propaganda works. Hitler really sold the idea that everything

Robin Hanson (49:39.920)

Germany is doing is either it's the victim is defending itself against the cruelty of the world,

Lex Fridman (49:45.760)

and it's actually trying to bring out about a better world. So every power center thinks they're

Robin Hanson (49:52.640)

doing good. And so this is the positive of competition, of having multiple power centers.

Robin Hanson (4:00:06.880)

most of them are presumably really experiencing what they're experiencing, but some fraction

Robin Hanson (4:00:10.880)

of them are experiencing some past time where that past time is being remembered via their

Lex Fridman (4:00:17.760)

simulation.

Lex Fridman (4:00:19.680)

So to figure out this ratio, what we need to think about is basically two functions.

Lex Fridman (4:00:26.000)

One is how fast in time does the number of creatures grow?

Lex Fridman (4:00:30.320)

And then how fast in time does the interest in the past decline?

Robin Hanson (4:00:34.800)

Because at any one time, people will be simulating different periods in the past with different

Robin Hanson (4:00:40.000)

emphasis.

Lex Fridman (4:00:40.480)

I love the way you think so much.

Robin Hanson (4:00:42.880)

That's exactly right, yeah.

Lex Fridman (4:00:44.160)

So if the first function grows slower than the second one declines, then in fact, your

Robin Hanson (4:00:51.680)

chances of being simulated are low.

Lex Fridman (4:00:54.160)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (4:00:54.720)

So the key question is how fast does interest in the past decline relative to the rate

Lex Fridman (4:00:58.960)

at which the population grows with time?

Robin Hanson (4:01:00.720)

Does this correlate to you earlier suggested that the interest in the future increases

Lex Fridman (4:01:05.040)

over time, are those correlated interest in the future versus interest in the past?

Lex Fridman (4:01:09.520)

Like, why are we interested in the past?

Robin Hanson (4:01:11.280)

So, but the simple way to do it is, as you know, like Google Ngrams has a way to type

Lex Fridman (4:01:15.840)

in a word and see how interest in it declines or rises over time, right?

Lex Fridman (4:01:20.400)

Yeah.

Robin Hanson (4:01:20.880)

You can just type in a year and get the answer for that.

Robin Hanson (4:01:24.160)

If you type in a particular year, like 1900 or 1950, you can see with Google Ngram, how

Robin Hanson (4:01:30.320)

interest in that year increased up until that date and decreased after it.

Lex Fridman (4:01:34.480)

Yep.

Lex Fridman (4:01:35.040)

And you can see that interest in a date declines faster than does the population grow with

Lex Fridman (4:01:41.040)

time.

Robin Hanson (4:01:42.880)

That is brilliant.

Lex Fridman (4:01:44.640)

That is so interesting.

Lex Fridman (4:01:45.600)

And so you have the answer.

Lex Fridman (4:01:48.000)

Wow.

Robin Hanson (4:01:49.120)

Wow.

Lex Fridman (4:01:50.560)

And that was your argument against, not against to this particular aspect of the simulation,

Lex Fridman (4:01:56.160)

how much past simulation there will be, replay of past memories.

Robin Hanson (4:02:01.920)

First of all, if we assume that like simulation of the past is a small fraction of all the

Robin Hanson (4:02:06.000)

creatures at that moment.

Lex Fridman (4:02:07.120)

Yes.

Robin Hanson (4:02:07.440)

Right.

Lex Fridman (4:02:08.880)

And then it's about how fast.

Robin Hanson (4:02:10.400)

Now, some people have argued plausibly that maybe most interest in the past falls with

Robin Hanson (4:02:15.680)

this fast function, but some unusual category of interest in the past won't fall that fast

Robin Hanson (4:02:19.840)

quickly.

Lex Fridman (4:02:20.160)

And then that eventually would dominate.

Lex Fridman (4:02:22.080)

So that's a other hypothesis you want.

Lex Fridman (4:02:24.240)

Some category.

Lex Fridman (4:02:25.440)

So that very outlier specific kind of, yeah, okay.

Lex Fridman (4:02:28.720)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robin Hanson (4:02:29.520)

Like really popular kinds of memories, like probably sexual.

Robin Hanson (4:02:35.040)

In a trillion years, there's some small research institute that tries to randomly select from

Robin Hanson (4:02:40.240)

all possible people in history or something to simulate.

Lex Fridman (4:02:42.560)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (4:02:46.080)

So the question is how big is this research institute and how big is the future in a trillion

Lex Fridman (4:02:50.640)

years, right?

Lex Fridman (4:02:51.200)

And that would be hard to say.

Lex Fridman (4:02:52.720)

But if we just look at the ordinary process by which people simulate recent errors.

Lex Fridman (4:02:57.680)

So if you look at, it's also true for movies and plays and video games,

Lex Fridman (4:03:02.000)

overwhelmingly they're interested in the recent past.

Robin Hanson (4:03:04.800)

There's very few video games where you play someone in the Roman Empire.

Lex Fridman (4:03:07.440)

Right.

Lex Fridman (4:03:08.160)

But even fewer where you play someone in the ancient Egyptian Empire.

Lex Fridman (4:03:14.320)

Yeah, just different.

Robin Hanson (4:03:15.440)

It's just declined very quickly.

Lex Fridman (4:03:16.560)

But every once in a while that's brought back.

Lex Fridman (4:03:20.880)

But yeah, you're right.

Robin Hanson (4:03:21.840)

I mean, just if you look at the mass of entertainment, movies and games, it's focusing on the present

Robin Hanson (4:03:28.160)

recent past.

Lex Fridman (4:03:29.200)

And maybe some, I mean, where does science fiction fit into this?

Lex Fridman (4:03:32.320)

Because it's sort of, what is science fiction?

Robin Hanson (4:03:39.040)

I mean, it's a mix of the past and the present and some kind of manipulation of that to make

Robin Hanson (4:03:44.000)

it more efficient for us to ask deep philosophical questions about humanity.

Lex Fridman (4:03:48.800)

The closest genre to science fiction is clearly fantasy.

Robin Hanson (4:03:51.520)

Fantasy and science fiction in many bookstores and even Netflix or whatever categories, they're

Lex Fridman (4:03:55.280)

just lumped together.

Lex Fridman (4:03:56.640)

So clearly they have a similar function.

Lex Fridman (4:03:58.240)

So that the function of fantasy is more transparent than the function of science fiction.

Lex Fridman (4:04:02.160)

So use that as your guide.

Robin Hanson (4:04:04.240)

What's fantasy for is just to take away the constraints of the ordinary world and imagine

Robin Hanson (4:04:08.800)

stories with much fewer constraints.

Lex Fridman (4:04:10.560)

That's what fantasy is.

Robin Hanson (4:04:11.840)

You are much less constrained.

Lex Fridman (4:04:13.040)

What's the purpose to remove constraints?

Lex Fridman (4:04:14.800)

Is it to escape from the harshness of the constraints of the real world?

Robin Hanson (4:04:19.600)

Or is it to just remove constraints in order to explore some, get a deeper understanding

Lex Fridman (4:04:24.960)

of our world?

Lex Fridman (4:04:26.000)

What is it?

Lex Fridman (4:04:26.800)

I mean, why do people read fantasy?

Lex Fridman (4:04:28.800)

I'm not a cheap fantasy reading kind of person.

Lex Fridman (4:04:34.320)

So I need to...

Robin Hanson (4:04:36.400)

One story that sounds plausible to me is that there are sort of these deep story structures

Robin Hanson (4:04:40.720)

that we love and we want to realize.

Lex Fridman (4:04:43.760)

And then many details of the world get in their way.

Robin Hanson (4:04:46.560)

Fantasy takes all those obstacles out of the way and lets you tell the essential hero story

Lex Fridman (4:04:51.200)

or the essential love story, whatever essential story you want to tell.

Robin Hanson (4:04:53.760)

Well, the reality and constraints are not in the way.

Lex Fridman (4:04:59.120)

And so science fiction can be thought of as like fantasy, except you're not willing to

Robin Hanson (4:05:02.640)

admit that it can't be true.

Lex Fridman (4:05:04.480)

So the future gives the excuse of saying, well, it could happen.

Lex Fridman (4:05:09.280)

And you accept some more reality constraints for the illusion, at least, that maybe it

Lex Fridman (4:05:13.840)

could really happen.

Robin Hanson (4:05:16.640)

Maybe it could happen.

Lex Fridman (4:05:18.080)

And that, it stimulates the imagination.

Robin Hanson (4:05:20.080)

Imagination is something really interesting about human beings.

Lex Fridman (4:05:24.880)

And it seems also to be an important part of creating really special things is to be

Robin Hanson (4:05:28.960)

able to first imagine them.

Robin Hanson (4:05:30.960)

With you and Nick Bostrom, where do you land on the simulation and all the mathematical

Lex Fridman (4:05:37.360)

ways of thinking it and just the thought experiment of it?

Lex Fridman (4:05:41.280)

Are we living in a simulation?

Robin Hanson (4:05:44.480)

That was just the discussion we just had.

Lex Fridman (4:05:46.720)

That is, you should grant the possibility of being a simulation.

Robin Hanson (4:05:50.000)

You shouldn't be 100% confident that you're not.

Lex Fridman (4:05:52.080)

You should certainly grant a small probability.

Lex Fridman (4:05:54.240)

The question is, how large is that probability?

Robin Hanson (4:05:56.160)

Are you saying we would be, I misunderstood because I thought our discussion was about

Robin Hanson (4:06:01.600)

replaying things that already happened.

Lex Fridman (4:06:03.360)

Right.

Lex Fridman (4:06:03.520)

But the whole question is, right now, is that what I am?

Lex Fridman (4:06:08.080)

Am I actually a replay from some distant future?

Lex Fridman (4:06:11.840)

But it doesn't necessarily need to be a replay.

Lex Fridman (4:06:13.680)

It could be a totally new.

Robin Hanson (4:06:15.280)

You could be, you don't have to be an NPC.

Lex Fridman (4:06:17.360)

Clearly, I'm in a certain era with a certain kind of world around me.

Lex Fridman (4:06:20.880)

So either this is a complete fantasy or it's a past of somebody else in the future.

Lex Fridman (4:06:26.480)

No, it could be a complete fantasy though.

Robin Hanson (4:06:28.080)

It could be.

Lex Fridman (4:06:28.640)

But then you have to talk about what's the fraction of complete fantasies.

Robin Hanson (4:06:33.680)

I would say it's easier to generate a fantasy than to replay a memory.

Lex Fridman (4:06:36.880)

Right?

Robin Hanson (4:06:37.120)

Oh, but the fraction is important.

Lex Fridman (4:06:39.840)

We just look at the entire history of everything.

Robin Hanson (4:06:41.600)

We just say, sure, but most things are real.

Lex Fridman (4:06:43.760)

Most things aren't fantasies.

Robin Hanson (4:06:45.200)

Therefore, the chance that my thing is real.

Lex Fridman (4:06:47.040)

Right?

Lex Fridman (4:06:47.440)

So the simulation argument works stronger about sort of the past.

Lex Fridman (4:06:50.560)

We say, ah, but there's more future people than there are today.

Lex Fridman (4:06:53.840)

So you being in the past of the future makes you special relative to them,

Lex Fridman (4:06:57.600)

which makes you more likely to be in a simulation.

Lex Fridman (4:06:59.840)

Right?

Lex Fridman (4:07:00.160)

If we're just taking the full count and saying, in all creatures ever,

Lex Fridman (4:07:03.680)

what percentage are in simulations?

Lex Fridman (4:07:05.120)

Probably no more than 10%.

Lex Fridman (4:07:08.240)

So what's the good argument for that?

Lex Fridman (4:07:10.000)

That most things are real?

Robin Hanson (4:07:11.680)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (4:07:12.080)

Because a classroom says the other way, right?

Robin Hanson (4:07:14.240)

In a competitive world, in a world where people have to work and have to get things done,

Lex Fridman (4:07:20.240)

then they have a limited budget for leisure.

Lex Fridman (4:07:24.080)

And so, you know, leisure things are less common than work things, like real things.

Lex Fridman (4:07:29.600)

Right?

Lex Fridman (4:07:29.840)

But if you look at the stretch of history in the universe, doesn't the ratio of leisure increase?

Lex Fridman (4:07:41.040)

Isn't that where we, isn't that the forger?

Robin Hanson (4:07:45.360)

Right, but now we're looking at the fraction of leisure,

Robin Hanson (4:07:47.360)

which takes the form of something where the person doing the leisure doesn't realize it.

Lex Fridman (4:07:51.920)

Now there could be some fraction of that, but that's much smaller, right?

Lex Fridman (4:07:55.200)

Yeah.

Robin Hanson (4:07:57.440)

Clueless forgers.

Lex Fridman (4:07:58.880)

Or somebody is clueless in the process of supporting this leisure, right?

Robin Hanson (4:08:02.640)

It might not be the person leisureing, somebody,

Lex Fridman (4:08:04.320)

they're a supporting character or something,

Lex Fridman (4:08:05.600)

but still that's got to be a pretty small fraction of leisure.

Robin Hanson (4:08:07.760)

What, you mentioned that children are one of the things that are a source of meaning.

Robin Hanson (4:08:13.760)

Broadly speaking, then let me ask the big question.

Lex Fridman (4:08:16.320)

What's the meaning of this whole thing?

Robin Hanson (4:08:19.040)

Robin, meaning of life.

Lex Fridman (4:08:21.120)

What is the meaning of life?

Robin Hanson (4:08:23.200)

We talked about alien civilizations, but this is the one we got.

Lex Fridman (4:08:27.600)

Where are the aliens?

Lex Fridman (4:08:28.800)

Where are the human?

Lex Fridman (4:08:30.960)

Seem to be conscious, be able to introspect.

Lex Fridman (4:08:35.040)

What's, why are we here?

Lex Fridman (4:08:37.280)

This is the thing I told you before about how we can predict that

Robin Hanson (4:08:40.720)

future creatures will be different from us.

Robin Hanson (4:08:43.840)

We, our preferences are this amalgam of various sorts of random sort of patched together

Robin Hanson (4:08:51.200)

preferences about thirst and sex and sleep and attention and all these sorts of things.

Lex Fridman (4:08:57.360)

So we don't understand that very well.

Lex Fridman (4:08:59.600)

It's not very transparent and it's a mess, right?

Lex Fridman (4:09:03.360)

That is the source of our motivation.

Robin Hanson (4:09:05.840)

That is how we were made and how we are induced to do things.

Lex Fridman (4:09:09.520)

But we can't summarize it very well and we don't even understand it very well.

Robin Hanson (4:09:13.760)

That's who we are.

Lex Fridman (4:09:15.040)

And often we find ourselves in a situation where we don't feel very motivated.

Robin Hanson (4:09:18.080)

We don't know why.

Robin Hanson (4:09:18.880)

In other situations, we find ourselves very motivated and we don't know why either.

Lex Fridman (4:09:24.480)

And so that's the nature of being a human of the sort that we are because

Lex Fridman (4:09:29.200)

even though we can think abstractly and reason abstractly, this package

Robin Hanson (4:09:32.400)

of motivations is just opaque and a mess.

Lex Fridman (4:09:34.640)

And that's what it means to be a human today and the motivation.

Robin Hanson (4:09:39.360)

We can't very well tell the meaning of our life.

Lex Fridman (4:09:42.160)

It is this mess that our descendants will be different.

Robin Hanson (4:09:44.800)

They will actually know exactly what they want.

Lex Fridman (4:09:48.160)

And it will be to have more descendants.

Robin Hanson (4:09:50.960)

That will be the meaning for them.

Lex Fridman (4:09:52.640)

Well, it's funny that you have the certainty.

Robin Hanson (4:09:54.560)

You have more certainty.

Robin Hanson (4:09:56.160)

You have more transparency about our descendants than you do about your own self.

Robin Hanson (4:10:01.840)

Right.

Lex Fridman (4:10:02.400)

So it's really interesting to think, because you mentioned this about love,

Robin Hanson (4:10:07.920)

that something that's fundamental about love is this opaqueness that we're not able

Robin Hanson (4:10:13.680)

to really introspect what the heck it is or all the feelings, the complex feelings.

Lex Fridman (4:10:19.280)

And that's true about many of our motivations.

Lex Fridman (4:10:21.360)

And that's what it means to be human of the 20th and the 21st century variety.

Lex Fridman (4:10:28.480)

Why is that not a feature that we will choose to persist in civilization then?

Lex Fridman (4:10:35.840)

This opaqueness, put another way, mystery, maintaining a sense of mystery

Robin Hanson (4:10:40.480)

about ourselves and about those around us.

Lex Fridman (4:10:43.360)

Maybe that's a really nice thing to have.

Robin Hanson (4:10:45.360)

Maybe.

Lex Fridman (4:10:46.080)

But, so, I mean, this is the fundamental issue in analyzing the future.

Lex Fridman (4:10:50.880)

What will set the future?

Lex Fridman (4:10:52.800)

One theory about what will set the future is, what do we want the future to be?

Lex Fridman (4:10:56.880)

What do we want the future to be?

Lex Fridman (4:10:58.480)

So under that theory, we should sit and talk about what we want the future to be,

Robin Hanson (4:11:01.440)

have some conferences, have some conventions, discussion things, vote on it maybe,

Lex Fridman (4:11:05.920)

and then hand out off to the implementation people to make the future the way we've

Robin Hanson (4:11:09.840)

decided it should be.

Robin Hanson (4:11:12.400)

That's not the actual process that's changed the world over history up to this point.

Robin Hanson (4:11:16.720)

It has not been the result of us deciding what we want and making it happen.

Lex Fridman (4:11:21.360)

In our individual lives, we can do that.

Robin Hanson (4:11:23.360)

We might decide what career we want or where we want to live, who we want to live with.

Robin Hanson (4:11:26.800)

In our individual lives, we often do slowly make our lives better according to our plan

Lex Fridman (4:11:31.520)

and our things, but that's not the whole world.

Robin Hanson (4:11:34.400)

The whole world so far has mostly been a competitive world where things happen if

Robin Hanson (4:11:38.880)

anybody anywhere chooses to adopt them and they have an advantage.

Lex Fridman (4:11:42.240)

And then it spreads and other people are forced to adopt it by competitive pressures.

Lex Fridman (4:11:46.240)

So that's the kind of analysis I can use to predict the future.

Lex Fridman (4:11:49.280)

And I do use that to predict the future.

Robin Hanson (4:11:50.800)

It doesn't tell us it'll be a future we like.

Lex Fridman (4:11:52.560)

It just tells us what it'll be.

Lex Fridman (4:11:54.640)

And it'll be one where we're trying to maximize the number of our descendants.

Lex Fridman (4:11:57.840)

And we know that abstractly and directly.

Lex Fridman (4:12:00.400)

And it's not opaque.

Robin Hanson (4:12:01.600)

With some probability that's nonzero, that will lead us to become grabby in expanding

Robin Hanson (4:12:09.920)

aggressively out into the cosmos until we meet other aliens.

Lex Fridman (4:12:13.680)

The timing isn't clear.

Robin Hanson (4:12:14.720)

We might become grabby and then this happens.

Robin Hanson (4:12:17.040)

These are, the grabbiness and this are both the result of competition, but it's less

Robin Hanson (4:12:21.280)

clear which happens first.

Lex Fridman (4:12:24.240)

Does this future excite you or scare you?

Lex Fridman (4:12:26.640)

How do you feel about this whole thing?

Robin Hanson (4:12:28.080)

Again, I told you compared to sort of a dead cosmology, at least it's energizing and having

Lex Fridman (4:12:33.120)

a living story with real actors and characters and agendas, right?

Lex Fridman (4:12:36.800)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (4:12:37.280)

And that's one hell of a fun universe to live in.

Lex Fridman (4:12:40.720)

Robin, you're one of the most fascinating, fun people to talk to.

Robin Hanson (4:12:44.480)

Brilliant, humble, systematic in your analysis.

Lex Fridman (4:12:48.800)

Hold on to my wallet here.

Lex Fridman (4:12:49.840)

What's he looking for?

Lex Fridman (4:12:50.880)

I already stole your wallet long ago.

Robin Hanson (4:12:52.960)

I really, really appreciate you spending your valuable time with me.

Lex Fridman (4:12:55.440)

I hope we get a chance to talk many more times in the future.

Robin Hanson (4:12:59.600)

Thank you so much for sitting down.

Lex Fridman (4:13:01.360)

Thank you.

Robin Hanson (4:13:03.200)

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Robin Hansen.

Lex Fridman (4:13:05.920)

To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

Lex Fridman (4:13:09.920)

And now let me leave you with some words from Ray Bradbury.

Lex Fridman (4:13:13.840)

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

Robin Hanson (4:13:17.840)

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Robin Hanson (50:01.600)

This kind of gathering of elites makes me very, very, very nervous. The dinners, the meetings

Lex Fridman (50:11.200)

and the closed rooms. I don't know. But remember we talked about separating our cold analysis of

Robin Hanson (50:19.440)

what's likely or possible from what we prefer. And so this isn't exactly enough time for that.

Robin Hanson (50:24.480)

We might say, I would recommend we don't go this route of a strong world governance. And because

Robin Hanson (50:32.320)

I would say it'll preclude this possibility of becoming rabid aliens, of filling the next

Robin Hanson (50:37.600)

nearest million galaxies for the next billion years with vast amounts of activity and interest

Lex Fridman (50:43.760)

and value of life out there. That's the thing we would lose by deciding that we wouldn't expand,

Robin Hanson (50:50.640)

that we would stay here and keep our comfortable shared governance.

Lex Fridman (50:55.280)

So you wait, you think that global governance is, makes it more likely or less likely that

Lex Fridman (51:06.560)

we expand out into the universe?

Lex Fridman (51:08.080)

Less.

Robin Hanson (51:09.440)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (51:10.000)

This is the key, this is the key point.

Robin Hanson (51:11.840)

Right. Right. So screw the elites.

Lex Fridman (51:16.400)

We want to, wait, do we want to expand?

Lex Fridman (51:19.360)

So again, I want to separate my neutral analysis from my evaluation and say,

Robin Hanson (51:25.920)

first of all, I have an analysis that tells us this is a key choice that we will face and that

Robin Hanson (51:30.480)

it's key choice other aliens have faced out there. And it could be that only one in 10 or one in 100

Robin Hanson (51:35.760)

civilizations chooses to expand and the rest of them stay quiet. And that's how it goes out there.

Lex Fridman (51:40.720)

And we face that choice too. And it'll happen sometime in the next 10 million years,

Robin Hanson (51:46.640)

maybe the next thousand. But the key thing to notice from our point of view is that

Robin Hanson (51:52.000)

even though you might like our global governance, you might like the fact that we've come together,

Lex Fridman (51:56.000)

we no longer have massive wars and we no longer have destructive competition.

Lex Fridman (52:01.520)

And that we could continue that, the cost of continuing that would be to prevent

Robin Hanson (52:06.640)

interstellar colonization. That is once you allow interstellar colonization, then you've lost

Robin Hanson (52:11.200)

control of those colonies and whatever they change into, they could come back here and compete with

Robin Hanson (52:16.720)

you back here as a result of having lost control. And I think if people value that global governance

Lex Fridman (52:23.600)

and global community and regulation and all the things it can do enough, they would then

Lex Fridman (52:29.200)

want to prevent interstellar colonization.

Robin Hanson (52:31.600)

I want to have a conversation with those people. I believe that both for humanity,

Robin Hanson (52:37.680)

for the good of humanity, for what I believe is good in humanity and for expansion, exploration,

Robin Hanson (52:44.880)

innovation, distributing the centers of power is very beneficial. So this whole meeting of elites

Lex Fridman (52:51.280)

and I've been very fortunate to meet quite a large number of elites. They make me nervous

Robin Hanson (52:59.040)

because it's easy to lose touch of reality. I'm nervous about that in myself to make sure that

Robin Hanson (53:10.000)

you never lose touch as you get sort of older, wiser, you know, how you generally get like

Robin Hanson (53:19.280)

disrespectful of kids, kids these days. No, the kids are okay. But I think you should hear

Robin Hanson (53:24.560)

a stronger case for their position. So I'm going to play for the elites. Yes. Well, for the limiting

Robin Hanson (53:32.720)

of expansion and for the regulation of behavior. Okay. Can I link on that? So you're saying those

Robin Hanson (53:39.920)

two are connected. So the human civilization and alien civilizations come to a crossroads.

Robin Hanson (53:47.760)

They have to decide, do we want to expand or not? And connected to that, do we want to give a lot

Robin Hanson (53:54.160)

of power to a central elite? Or do we want to distribute the power centers, which is naturally

Robin Hanson (54:03.200)

connected to the expansion? When you expand, you distribute the power. If say over the next thousand

Robin Hanson (54:10.640)

years, we fill up the solar system, right? We go out from earth and we colonize Mars and we change

Robin Hanson (54:15.920)

a lot of things. Within a solar system, still everything is within reach. That is, if there's

Robin Hanson (54:20.960)

a rebellious colony around Neptune, you can throw rocks at it and smash it and then teach them

Robin Hanson (54:25.200)

discipline. Okay. A central control over the solar system is feasible. But once you let it escape the

Robin Hanson (54:34.400)

solar system, it's no longer feasible. But if you have a solar system that doesn't have a central

Robin Hanson (54:38.640)

control, maybe broken into a thousand different political units in the solar system, then any one

Robin Hanson (54:44.640)

part of that that allows interstellar colonization and it happens. That is interstellar colonization

Robin Hanson (54:50.240)

happens when only one party chooses to do it and is able to do it. And that's what it is there for.

Lex Fridman (54:55.760)

So we can just say in a world of competition, if interstellar colonization is possible, it will

Robin Hanson (55:00.800)

happen and then competition will continue. And that will sort of ensure the continuation of

Robin Hanson (55:04.640)

competition into the indefinite future. And competition, we don't know, but competition

Robin Hanson (55:10.480)

can take violent forms and many forms. And the case I was going to make is that I think one of

Robin Hanson (55:15.840)

the things that most scares people about competition is not just that it creates holocausts and death

Robin Hanson (55:21.280)

on massive scales, is that it's likely to change who we are and what we value.

Robin Hanson (55:28.480)

Yes. So this is the other thing with power. As we grow, as human civilization grows,

Lex Fridman (55:37.120)

becomes multi planetary, multi solar system potentially, how does that change us, do you think?

Robin Hanson (55:43.200)

I think the more you think about it, the more you realize it can change us a lot.

Lex Fridman (55:48.080)

So first of all, this is pretty dark, by the way. Well, it's just honest.

Robin Hanson (55:53.440)

Right. Well, I'm trying to get there. But I think the first thing you should say,

Robin Hanson (55:55.920)

if you look at history, just human history over the last 10,000 years,

Robin Hanson (55:59.760)

if you really understood what people were like a long time ago, you'd realize they were really

Robin Hanson (56:04.160)

quite different. Ancient cultures created people who were really quite different. Most historical

Robin Hanson (56:09.520)

fiction lies to you about that. It often offers you modern characters in an ancient world.

Lex Fridman (56:14.640)

But if you actually study history, you will see just how different they were and how differently

Robin Hanson (56:19.040)

they thought. And they've changed a lot many times, and they've changed a lot across time.

Lex Fridman (56:25.120)

So I think the most obvious prediction about the future is, even if you only have the mechanisms

Robin Hanson (56:29.920)

of change we've seen in the past, you should still expect a lot of change in the future.

Lex Fridman (56:33.840)

But we have a lot bigger mechanisms for change in the future than we had in the past.

Lex Fridman (56:37.920)

So I have this book called The Age of M, Work, Love, and Life, and Robots Rule the Earth. And

Robin Hanson (56:44.880)

it's about what happens if brain emulations become possible. So a brain emulation is where you take

Robin Hanson (56:49.760)

a actual human brain, and you scan it and find spatial and chemical detail to create

Robin Hanson (56:55.040)

a computer simulation of that brain. And then those computer simulations of brains

Robin Hanson (57:00.160)

are basically citizens in a new world. They work, and they vote, and they fall in love,

Lex Fridman (57:04.560)

and they get mad, and they lie to each other. And this is a whole new world. And my book is

Robin Hanson (57:08.800)

about analyzing how that world is different than our world, basically using competition as my key

Robin Hanson (57:14.640)

lever of analysis. That is, if that world remains competitive, then I can figure out how they change

Robin Hanson (57:19.920)

in that world, what they do differently than we do. And it's very different. And it's different in

Robin Hanson (57:26.640)

ways that are shocking sometimes to many people and ways some people don't like. I think it's an

Robin Hanson (57:32.080)

okay world, but I have to admit, it's quite different. And that's just one technology.

Robin Hanson (57:37.920)

If we add dozens more technologies, changes into the future, we should just expect it's possible

Robin Hanson (57:45.200)

to become very different than who we are. I mean, in the space of all possible minds,

Robin Hanson (57:49.760)

our minds are a particular architecture, a particular structure, a particular set of habits,

Lex Fridman (57:54.960)

and they are only one piece in a vast base of possibilities. The space of possible minds is

Robin Hanson (58:00.400)

really huge. So yeah, let's linger on the space of possible minds for a moment, just to sort of

Robin Hanson (58:07.840)

humble ourselves. How peculiar our peculiarities are, like the fact that we like a particular kind

Robin Hanson (58:19.040)

of sex, and the fact that we eat food through one hole and poop through another hole. And that seems

Robin Hanson (58:27.440)

to be a fundamental aspect of life, is very important to us. And that life is finite in a

Robin Hanson (58:35.840)

certain kind of way, we have a meat vehicle. So death is very important to us. I wonder which

Robin Hanson (58:41.520)

aspects are fundamental, or would be common throughout human history and also throughout,

Robin Hanson (58:47.440)

sorry, throughout history of life on Earth, and throughout other kinds of lives. Like what is

Lex Fridman (58:53.600)

really useful? You mentioned competition seems to be a one fundamental thing.

Robin Hanson (58:57.680)

I've tried to do analysis of where our distant descendants might go in terms of what are robust

Robin Hanson (59:03.600)

features we could predict about our descendants. So again, I have this analysis of sort of the

Robin Hanson (59:08.240)

next generation, so the next era after ours. If you think of human history as having three eras

Lex Fridman (59:13.680)

so far, right? There was the forager era, the farmer era, and the industry era. Then my attempt

Robin Hanson (59:18.800)

in age of M is to analyze the next era after that. And it's very different, but of course,

Robin Hanson (59:22.640)

there could be more and more errors after that. So analyzing a particular scenario and thinking

Robin Hanson (59:28.080)

it through is one way to try to see how different the future could be, but that doesn't give you

Robin Hanson (59:32.800)

some sort of sense of what's typical. But I have tried to analyze what's typical.

Lex Fridman (59:38.960)

And so I have two predictions I think I can make pretty solidly. One thing is that we know at the

Robin Hanson (59:45.440)

moment that humans discount the future rapidly. So we discount the future in terms of caring

Robin Hanson (59:52.240)

about consequences, roughly a factor of two per generation. And there's a solid evolutionary

Robin Hanson (59:56.960)

analysis why sexual creatures would do that. Because basically your descendants only share