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The following is a conversation with Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, The Magic of Reality, and The Greatest Show of Earth, and his latest, All-Growing God.
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He s the originator and popularizer of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and science in general, including, funny enough, the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, which, in the context of a gene-centered view of evolution, is an exceptionally powerful idea.
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He s outspoken, bold, and often fearless in the defense of science and reason, and in this way, is one of the most influential thinkers of our time.
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This conversation was recorded before the outbreak of the pandemic.
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For everyone feeling the medical, psychological, and financial burden of this crisis, I m sending love your way.
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Stay strong.
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We re in this together.
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We ll beat this thing.
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This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
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If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N.
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As usual, I ll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation.
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I hope that works for you and doesn t hurt the listening experience.
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And now, here s my conversation with Richard Dawkins.
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Do you think there s intelligent life out there in the universe?
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Well, if we accept that there s intelligent life here, and we accept that the number of planets in the universe is gigantic, I mean, 10 to 22 stars has been estimated, it seems to me highly likely that there is not only life in the universe elsewhere, but also intelligent life.
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If you deny that, then you re committed to the view that the things that happened on this planet are staggeringly improbable.
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I mean, ludicrously, off the charts improbable.
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And I don t think it s that improbable.
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certainly the origin of life itself.
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There are really two steps, the origin of life, which is probably fairly improbable, and then the subsequent evolution to intelligent life, which is also fairly improbable.
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So the juxtaposition of those two you could say is pretty improbable, but not 10 to the 22 improbable.
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It s an interesting question, maybe you re coming on to it, how we would recognize intelligence from outer space if we encountered it.
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The most likely way we would come across them would be by radio.
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It s highly unlikely they d ever visit us, but it s not that unlikely that we would pick up radio signals, and then we would have to have some means of deciding that it was intelligent.
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People involved in the SETI program discuss how they would do it, and things like prime numbers would be an obvious thing to, an obvious way for them to broadcast, to say, we are intelligent, we are here.
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I suspect it probably would be obvious, actually.
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Well, it s interesting, prime numbers, so the mathematical patterns, it s an open question whether mathematics is the same for us as it would be for aliens.
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I suppose we could assume that ultimately, if we re governed by the same laws of physics, then we should be governed by the same laws of mathematics.
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I think so.
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I suspect that they will have Pythagoras  theorem, et cetera.
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I don t think that their mathematics will be that different.
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Do you think evolution would also be a force on the alien planets as well?
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I stuck my neck out and said that if ever that we do discover life elsewhere, it will be Darwinian life, in the sense that it will work by some kind of natural selection, the non-random survival of randomly generated codes.
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It doesn t mean that the genetic, it would have to have some kind of genetics, but it doesn t have to be DNA genetics, probably wouldn t be actually.
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But I think it would have to be Darwinian, yes.
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So some kind of selection process?
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Yes, in the general sense it would be Darwinian.
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So let me ask kind of an artificial intelligence engineering question.
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So you ve been an outspoken critic of, I guess what could be called intelligent design, which is an attempt to describe the creation of a human mind and body by some religious folks, religious folks used to describe.
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So broadly speaking, evolution is, as far as I know, again, you can correct me, is the only scientific theory we have for the development of intelligent life.
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Like there s no alternative theory as far as I understand.
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None has ever been suggested, and I suspect it never will be.
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Well, of course, whenever somebody says that 100 years later.
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I know, it s a risk.
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It s a risk.
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But you ve got to bet, I mean, I m pretty confident.
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But it would look, sorry, yes, it would probably look very similar, but it s almost like Einstein s general relativity versus Newtonian physics.
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It ll be maybe an alteration of the theory or something like that, but it won t be fundamentally different.
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But okay.
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So now for the past 70 years, even before, the AI community has been trying to engineer intelligence, in a sense, to do what intelligent design says was done here on Earth.
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What s your intuition?
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Do you think it s possible to build intelligence, to build computers that are intelligent, or do we need to do something like the evolutionary process?
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There s no shortcuts here.
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That s an interesting question.
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I m committed to the belief that is ultimately possible because I think there s nothing non-physical in our brains.
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I think our brains work by the laws of physics and so it must in principle be possible to replicate that.
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In practice, though, it might be very difficult, and as you suggest, it may be the only way to do it is by something like an evolutionary process.
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I d be surprised, I suspect that it will come, but it s certainly been slower in coming than some of the early pioneers thought.
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Thought it would be, yeah.
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But in your sense, is the evolutionary process efficient?
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So you can see it as exceptionally wasteful in one perspective, but at the same time, maybe that is the only path
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It s a paradox, isn t it?
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I mean, on the one side, it is deplorably wasteful.
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It s fundamentally based on waste.
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On the other hand, it does produce magnificent results.
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I mean, the design of a soaring bird, an albatross, a vulture, an eagle,
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is superb, an engineer would be proud to have done it.
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On the other hand, an engineer would not be proud to have done some of the other things that evolution has served up.
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Some of the sort of botched jobs that you can easily understand because of their historical origins, but they don t look well designed.
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Do you have examples of bad design?
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My favorite example is the recurrent laryngeal nerve.
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I ve used this many times.
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This is a nerve, it s one of the cranial nerves, which goes from the brain
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and the end organ that it supplies is the voice box, the larynx.
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But it doesn t go straight to the larynx, it goes right down into the chest and then loops around an artery in the chest and then comes straight back up again to the larynx.
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And I ve assisted in the dissection of a giraffe s neck, which happened to have died in a zoo.
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And we saw the recurrent laryngeal nerve whizzing straight past the larynx, within an inch of the larynx, down into the chest, and then back up again, which is a detour of many feet.
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Very, very inefficient.
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The reason is historical.
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the ancestors, our fish ancestors, the ancestors of all mammals and fish, the most direct pathway of the equivalent of that nerve, there wasn t a larynx in those days, but it innervated part of the gills, the most direct pathway was behind that artery.
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And then when the tetrapods, when the land vertebrae started evolving, and then the neck started to stretch, the marginal cost
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of changing the embryological design to jump that nerve over the artery was too great.
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Or rather, each step of the way was a very small cost, but the cost of actually jumping it over would have been very large.
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As the neck lengthened, it was a negligible change to just increase the length of the detour a tiny bit, a tiny bit, a tiny bit, each millimeter at a time, didn t make any difference.
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And so, but finally, when you get to a giraffe,
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It s a huge detour, and no doubt is very inefficient.
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Now that s bad design.
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Any engineer would reject that piece of design.
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It s ridiculous.
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And there are quite a number of examples, as you d expect.
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It s not surprising that we find examples of that sort.
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In a way, what s surprising is there aren t more of them.
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In a way, what s surprising is that the design of living things is so good.
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So natural selection manages to achieve excellent results.
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partly by tinkering, partly by coming along and cleaning up initial mistakes and as it were, making the best of a bad job.
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That s really interesting.
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I mean, it is surprising and beautiful and it s a mystery from an engineering perspective that so many things are well-designed.
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I suppose the thing we re forgetting is how many generations have to die for that.
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Oh yeah, that s the inefficiency of it.
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Yes, that s the horrible wastefulness of it.
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So yeah, we marvel at the final product, but yeah, the process is painful.
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Elon Musk describes human beings as potentially what he calls the biological bootloader for artificial intelligence, or artificial general intelligence is used as the term.
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It s kind of like super intelligence.
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Do you see superhuman level intelligence as potentially the next step in the evolutionary process?
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Yes, I think that if superhuman intelligence is to be found, it will be artificial.
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I don t have any hope that we ourselves, our brains, will go on getting larger in ordinary biological evolution.
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I think that s probably coming to an end.
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It is the dominant trend or one of the dominant trends in our fossil history for the last two or three million years.
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Brain size?
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Brain size, yes.
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So it s been swelling rather dramatically over the last two or three million years.
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That is unlikely to continue.
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The only way that happens is because natural selection favours
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those individuals with the biggest brains.
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And that s not happening anymore.
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Right.
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In general, in humans, the selection pressures are not active.
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I mean, are they active in any form?
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In order for them to be active, it would be necessary that the most intelligent, let s call it intelligence, not that intelligence is simply correlated with brain size, but let s talk about intelligence.
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In order for that to evolve, it s necessary that the most intelligent individuals have the most children.
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And
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So intelligence may buy you money, it may buy you worldly success, it may buy you a nice house and a nice car and things like that if you have a successful career.
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It may buy you the admiration of your fellow people, but it doesn t increase the number of offspring that you have.
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It doesn t increase your genetic legacy to the next generation.
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On the other hand, artificial intelligence, I mean, computers and technology generally, is evolving by a non-genetic means, by leaps and bounds, of course.
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And so what do you think, I don t know if you re familiar, there s a company called Neuralink, but there s a general effort of brain-computer interfaces, which is to try to build a connection between the computer and the brain, to send signals both directions.
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And the long-term dream there is to do exactly that, which is expand.
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I guess expand the size of the brain, expand the capabilities of the brain.
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Do you see this as interesting?
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Do you see this as a promising possible technology?
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Or is the interface between the computer and the brain, like the brain is this wet, messy thing that s just impossible to interface with?
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Well, of course, it s interesting.
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Whether it s promising, I m really not qualified to say.
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What I do find puzzling is that the brain being as small as it is compared to a computer and the individual components being as slow as they are compared to our electronic components, it is astonishing what it can do.
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I mean,
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Imagine building a computer that fits into the size of a human skull and with the equivalent of transistors or integrated circuits which work as slowly as neurons do.
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There s something mysterious about that.
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Something must be going on that we don t understand.
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So I ve just talked to Roger Penrose, I m not sure if you re familiar with his work.
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He also describes this kind of mystery in the mind, in the brain, that as he sees a materialist, so there s no sort of mystical thing going on, but there s so much about the material of the brain that we don t understand, that might be quantum mechanical in nature and so on.
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So there the idea is about consciousness.
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Do you have any, have you ever thought about, do you ever think about ideas of consciousness or a little bit more about the mystery of intelligence and consciousness that seems to pop up just like you re saying from our brain?
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I agree with Roger Penrose that there is a mystery there.
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I mean, he s one of the world s greatest physicists.
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I can t possibly argue with his.
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But nobody knows anything about consciousness.
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And in fact, you know, if we talk about religion and so on, the mystery of consciousness is so awe-inspiring and we know so little about it that the leap to sort of religious or mystical explanations is too easy to make.
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I think that it s just an act of cowardice to leap to religious explanations and Roger doesn t do that of course.
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but I accept that there may be something that we don t understand about it.
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So correct me if I m wrong, but in your book, Selfish Gene, the gene-centered view of evolution allows us to think of the physical organisms as just the medium through which the software of our genetics and the ideas sort of propagate.
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So maybe can we start just with the basics?
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What in this context does the word meme mean?
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It would mean the cultural equivalent of a gene, cultural equivalent in the sense of that which plays the same role as the gene in the transmission of culture, in the transmission of ideas in the broadest sense.
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And it s only a useful word if there s something Darwinian going on.
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Obviously culture is transmitted, but is there anything Darwinian going on?
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And if there is, that means there has to be something like a gene.
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which becomes more numerous or less numerous in the population.
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So it can replicate?
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It can replicate.
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Well, it clearly does replicate.
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There s no question about that.
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The question is, does it replicate in a sort of differential way in a Darwinian fashion?
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Could you say that certain ideas propagate because they re successful in the meme pool?
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In a sort of trivial sense, you can.
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Would you wish to say though that in the same way as an animal body is modified, adapted to serve as a machine for propagating genes, is it also a machine for propagating memes?
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Could you actually say that something about the way a human is
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is modified, adapted for the function of beam propagation.
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That s such a fascinating possibility, if that s true.
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That it s not just about the genes which seem somehow more comprehensible as these things of biology.
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The idea that culture or maybe ideas, you can really broadly define it.
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Yes.
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operates under these mechanisms.
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Even morphology, even anatomy does evolve by mimetic means.
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I mean, things like hairstyles, styles of makeup, circumcision, these things are actual changes in the body form which are non-genetic and which get passed on from generation to generation or sideways like a virus in a quasi-genetic way.
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but the moment you start drifting away from the physical, it becomes interesting, because the space of ideas, ideologies, political systems.
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So what s your sense?
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Are memes a metaphor more, or are they really, is there something fundamental, almost physical presence of memes?
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Well, I think they re a bit more than a metaphor, and I think that,
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I mentioned the physical bodily characteristics, which are a bit trivial in a way, but with things like the propagation of religious ideas.
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both longitudinally down generations and transversely as in a sort of epidemiology of ideas.
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When a charismatic preacher converts people, that resembles viral transmission.
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Whereas the longitudinal transmission from grandparent to parent to child, et cetera, is more like conventional genetic transmission.
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That s such a beautiful, especially in the modern day, idea.
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Do you think about this implication in social networks where the propagation of ideas, the viral propagation of ideas, and hence the new use of the word meme to describe the- The internet, of course, provides
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extremely rapid method of crowd-imaging.
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Before, when I first coined the word, the internet didn t exist, and so I was thinking then in terms of books, newspapers, radio, television, that kind of thing.
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Now an idea can just leap around the world in all directions instantly.
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And so the internet provides a step change in the facility of propagation of memes.
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How does that make you feel?
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Isn t it fascinating that sort of ideas, it s like you have Galapagos Islands or something, it s the seventies and the internet allowed all these species to just like globalize.
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And in a matter of seconds, you could spread a message to millions of people and these,
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ideas, these memes can breed, can evolve, can mutate.
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And there s a selection and there s like different, I guess, groups that have all like there s a dynamics that s fascinating here.
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Do you think yes, basically,
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Do you think your work in this direction, while fundamentally it was focused on life on Earth, do you think it should continue to be taken further?
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I do think it would probably be a good idea to think in a Darwinian way about this sort of thing.
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We conventionally think of the transmission of ideas in evolutionary context as being limited to, in our ancestors, people living in villages, living in small bands where everybody knew each other and ideas could propagate within the village and they might hop to a neighboring village.
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occasionally and maybe even to a neighboring continent eventually.
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And that was a slow process.
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Nowadays, villages are international.
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I mean, you have people, it s been called echo chambers, where people are in a sort of internet village.
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where the other members of the village may be geographically distributed all over the world, but they just happen to be interested in the same things, use the same terminology, the same jargon, have the same enthusiasm.
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So people like the Flat Earth Society.
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they don t all live in one place, they find each other and they talk the same language to each other, they talk the same nonsense to each other.
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But so this is a kind of distributed version of the primitive idea of people living in villages and propagating their ideas in a local way.
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Is there Darwinist parallel here?
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So is there evolutionary purpose of villages or is that just a,
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I wouldn t use a word like evolutionary purpose in that case, but villages or villages will be something that just emerged.
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That s the way people happen to live.
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And in just the same kind of way, the flat earth societies, societies of ideas emerge in the same kind of way in this digital space.
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Yes, yes.
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Is there something interesting to say about the, I guess, from a perspective of Darwin, could we fully interpret the dynamics of social interaction in these social networks?
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Or is there some much more complicated thing that needs to be developed?
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Like, what s your sense?
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Well, a Darwinian selection idea would involve investigating which ideas spread and which don t.
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So, some ideas don t have the ability to spread.
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I mean, flat Earthism, there are a few people who believe in it, but it s not going to spread because it s obvious nonsense.
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But other ideas, even if they are wrong,
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can spread because they are attractive in some sense.
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So the spreading and the selection in the Darwinian context is, it just has to be attractive in some sense.
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Like we don t have to define, like it doesn t have to be attractive in the way that animals attract each other.
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It could be attractive in some other way.
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Yes, it s, all that matters is, all that s needed is that it should spread.
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And it doesn t have to be true to spread.
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Truth is one criterion which might help an idea to spread.
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But there are other criteria which might help it to spread.
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As you say, attraction in animals is not necessarily valuable for survival.
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Celebrating the famous peacock s tail doesn t help the peacock to survive.
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It helps it to pass on its genes.
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Similarly, an idea which is actually rubbish
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but which people don t know is rubbish and think is very attractive will spread in the same way as a peacock s gene spread.
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It s a small sidestep.
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I remember reading somewhere, I think recently, that in some species of birds, sort of the idea that beauty may have its own purpose and the idea that some,
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Some birds, I m being ineloquent here, but there s some aspects of their feathers and so on that serve no evolutionary purpose whatsoever.
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There s somebody making an argument that there are some things about beauty that animals do that may be its own purpose.
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That s...
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Does that ring a bell for you?
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Does it sound ridiculous?
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I think it s a rather distorted bell.
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Darwin, when he coined the phrase sexual selection, didn t feel the need to
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suggest that what was attractive to females, usually it s males attracting females, that what females found attractive had to be useful.
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He said it didn t have to be useful.
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It was enough that females found it attractive.
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And so it could be completely useless, probably was completely useless in the conventional sense.
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but was not at all useless in the sense of passing on, well Darwin didn t call them genes, but in the sense of reproducing.
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Others, starting with Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, didn t like that idea and they wanted
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sexually selected characteristics like peacock s tails to be in some sense useful.
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It s a bit of a stretch to think of a peacock s tail as being useful in the sense of survival, but others have run with that idea and have brought it up to date.
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And so there are two schools of thought on sexual selection which are still active and about equally supported now.
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those who follow Darwin in thinking that it s just enough to say it s attractive, and those who follow Wallace and say that it has to be in some sense useful.
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Do you fall into one category or the other?
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No, I m open-minded.
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I think they both could be correct in different cases.
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I mean, they ve both been made sophisticated in a mathematical sense, more so than when Darwin and Wallace first started talking about it.
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I m Russian, I romanticize things, so I prefer the former, where the beauty in itself is a powerful attraction, is a powerful force in evolution.
1
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On religion, do you think there will ever be a time in our future where almost nobody believes in God?
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Or God is not a part of the moral fabric of our society?
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SPEAKER_00
Yes, I do.
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I think it may happen after a very long time.
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SPEAKER_00
I think it may take a long time for that to happen.
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So do you think ultimately for everybody on earth, religion, other forms of doctrines, ideas could do a better job than what religion does?
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Yes.
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I mean, following truth.
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Well, truth is a funny, funny word and reason too.
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There s, yeah, it s a difficult idea now with truth on the internet, right, and fake news and so on.
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SPEAKER_01
I suppose when you say reason, you mean the very basic sort of inarguable conclusions of science versus which political system is better.
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Yes, yes.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean,
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truth about the real world, which is ascertainable by not just by the more rigorous methods of science, but by just ordinary sensory observation.
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So do you think there will ever be a time when we move past it?
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Like, I guess another way to ask it, are we hopelessly, fundamentally tied to religion in the way our society functions?
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SPEAKER_00
Well, clearly all individuals are not hopelessly tied to it because many individuals don t believe.
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You could mean something like society needs religion in order to function properly, something like that.
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And some people have suggested that.
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What s your intuition on that?
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Well, I ve read books on it and they re persuasive.
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I don t think they re that persuasive though.
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I mean, some people suggested that society
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needs a sort of figurehead, which can be a non-existent figurehead in order to function properly.
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I think there s something rather patronizing about the idea that, well, you and I are intelligent enough not to believe in God, but the plebs need it sort of thing.
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And I think that s patronizing.
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And I d like to think that that was not the right way to proceed.
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But at the individual level, do you think there s some value
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of spirituality, sort of, if I think sort of as a scientist, the amount of things we actually know about our universe is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of what we could possibly know.
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So just from everything, even the certainty we have about the laws of physics, it seems to be that there s yet a huge amount to discover.
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And therefore we re sitting where 99.999% of things is just still shrouded in mystery.
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Do you think there s a role in a kind of spiritual view of that, sort of a humbled spiritual?
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SPEAKER_00
I think it s right to be humble.
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I think it s right to admit that there s a lot we don t know, a lot that we don t understand, a lot that we still need to work on.
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We re working on it.
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What I don t think is that it helps to invoke supernatural explanations.
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current scientific explanations aren t adequate to do the job, then we need better ones, we need to work more.
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And of course, the history of science shows just that, that as science goes on, problems get solved one after another, and the science advances, the science gets better.
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But to invoke a non-scientific, non-physical
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explanation is simply to lie down in a cowardly way and say, we can t solve it, so we re going to invoke magic.
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Don t let s do that, let s say we need better science, we need more science.
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It may be that the science will never do it, it may be that we will never actually understand everything.
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And that s okay, but let s keep working on it.
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A challenging question there is, do you think science can lead us astray in terms of the humbleness?
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So there s some aspect of science
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Maybe it s the aspect of scientists and not science, but of sort of a mix of ego and confidence that can lead us astray in terms of discovering some of the big open questions about the universe.
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I think that s right.
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arrogant people in any walk of life and scientists are no exception to that and so there are arrogant scientists who think we ve solved everything and of course we haven t.
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So humility is a proper stance for a scientist.
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I mean it s a proper working stance because it encourages further work.
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But in a way to resort to a supernatural explanation is a kind of arrogance because it s saying well we don t understand it scientifically therefore
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the non-scientific religious supernatural explanation must be the right one.
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That s arrogant.
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What is humble is to say, we don t know, and we need to work further on it.
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So maybe if I could psychoanalyze you for a second.
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You have at times been just slightly frustrated with people who have a supernatural,
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Has that changed over the years?
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How do people that seek supernatural explanations, how do you see those people as human beings?
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Do you see them as dishonest?
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Do you see them as sort of ignorant?
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Do you see them as...
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I don t know.
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How do you think of those people?
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Certainly not dishonest.
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And I mean, obviously, many of them are perfectly nice people.
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So I don t sort of despise them in that sense.
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I think it s often a misunderstanding that people will jump from the admission that we don t understand something
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will jump straight to what they think of as an alternative explanation, which is the supernatural one, which is not an alternative, it s a non-explanation, instead of jumping to the conclusion that science needs more work, that we need to actually do some better science.
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So
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I don t have, I mean, personal antipathy towards such people.
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I just think they re misguided.
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So what about this really interesting space that I have trouble with?
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So religion I have a better grasp on, but there s large communities, like you said, Flat Earth community that I ve recently, because I ve made a few jokes about it, I saw that there s, I ve noticed that there s people that take it quite seriously.
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So there s this bigger world of conspiracy theorists, which is a kind of, I mean, there s elements of it that are religious as well, but I think they re also scientific.
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So the basic credo of a conspiracy theorist is to question everything, which is also the credo of a good scientist, I would say.
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So what do you make of this?
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think it s probably too easy to say that by labelling something a conspiracy, you therefore dismiss it.
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I mean, occasionally conspiracies are right.
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And so we shouldn t dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand.
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We should examine them on their own merits.
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Flat Earthism is obvious nonsense.
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We don t have to examine that much further.
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But I mean, there may be other conspiracy theories which are actually right.
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But I grew up in the Soviet Union, so the space race was very influential for me on both sides of the coin.
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SPEAKER_00
There s a conspiracy theory that we never went to the moon, right?
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It s like I cannot understand it, and it s very difficult to rigorously scientifically show one way or the other.
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SPEAKER_00
It s just you have to use some of the human intuition about who would have to lie, who would have to work together, and it s clear that very unlikely good, behind that is my general intuition that most people in this world are good.
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you know, in order to really put together some conspiracy theories, there has to be a large number of people working together and essentially being dishonest.
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SPEAKER_01
Yes, which is improbable.
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The sheer number who would have to be in on this conspiracy and the sheer detail, the attention to detail they d have had to have had and so on.
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I d also worry about the motive.
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And why would anyone want to suggest that it didn t happen?
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What s the
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Why is it so hard to believe?
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I mean the physics of it, the mathematics of it, the idea of computing orbits and trajectories and things, it all works mathematically.
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Why wouldn t you believe it?
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SPEAKER_00
It s a psychology question because there s something really pleasant about
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you know, pointing out that the emperor has no clothes when everybody, like, you know, thinking outside the box and coming up with a true answer where everybody else is deluded.
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SPEAKER_00
There s something, I mean, I have that for science, right?
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SPEAKER_00
You want to prove the entire scientific community wrong.
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SPEAKER_00
That s the whole.
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That s right, and of course, historically,
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Lone geniuses have come out right sometimes, but often people who think they re a lone genius much more often turn out not to.
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So you have to judge each case on its merits.
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The mere fact that you re a maverick, the mere fact that you re going against the current tide doesn t make you right.
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You ve got to show you re right by looking at the evidence.
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SPEAKER_00
So because you ve focused so much on religion and disassembled a lot of ideas there, I was wondering if you have ideas about conspiracy
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theory groups, because it s such a prevalent, even reaching into presidential politics and so on.
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It seems like it s a very large communities that believe different kinds of conspiracy theories.
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Is there some connection there to your thinking on religion?
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SPEAKER_01
It is curious, it s a matter, it s an obviously difficult thing.
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I don t understand why people believe things that are clearly nonsense like
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well, flat earth and also the conspiracy about not landing on the moon or that the United States engineered 9-11, that kind of thing.
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SPEAKER_01
So it s not clearly nonsense, it s extremely unlikely.
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SPEAKER_01
Okay, it s extremely unlikely.
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Religion is a bit different because it s passed down from generation to generation.
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So many of the people who are religious
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got it from their parents, who got it from their parents, who got it from their parents.
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SPEAKER_01
And childhood indoctrination is a very powerful force.
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But these things like the 9-11 conspiracy theory, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory, the man on the moon conspiracy theory, these are not childhood indoctrination.
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SPEAKER_01
These are
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presumably dreamed up by somebody, who then tells somebody else, who then wants to believe it.
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And I don t know why people are so eager to fall in line with just some person that they happen to read or meet, who spins some yarn.
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I can kind of understand why they believe what their parents and teachers told them when they were very tiny.
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and not capable of critical thinking for themselves.
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So I sort of get why the great religions of the world, like Catholicism and Islam, go on persisting.
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It s because of childhood indoctrination.
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But that s not true of Flat Earthism.
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And sure enough, Flat Earthism is a very minority cult.
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SPEAKER_00
Way larger than I ever realized.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, yes, I know.
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SPEAKER_00
But so that s a really clean idea.
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SPEAKER_00
You ve articulated that in your new book and then and I ll grow in God and in God delusion is the early indoctrination.
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SPEAKER_00
That s really interesting.
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SPEAKER_00
You can get away with a lot of
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out there ideas in terms of religious texts if the age at which you convey those ideas at first is a young age.
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So indoctrination is sort of an essential element of propagation of religion.
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SPEAKER_00
So let me ask on the morality side, in the books that I mentioned, God Delusion, Al Gore and God, you described that human beings don t need religion to be moral.
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So from an engineering perspective, we wanna engineer morality into AI systems.
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SPEAKER_00
So in general, where do you think morals come from in humans?
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SPEAKER_01
A very complicated and interesting question.
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It s clear to me that the moral standards, the moral values of our civilization changes as the decades go by, certainly as the centuries go by, even as the decades go by.
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We in the 21st century are quite clearly labeled 21st century people in terms of our moral values.
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SPEAKER_01
There s a spread.
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I mean, some of us are a little bit more ruthless, some of us more conservative, some of us more liberal and so on.
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SPEAKER_01
But we all subscribe to pretty much the same views when you compare us with
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say 18th century, 17th century people, even 19th century, 20th century people.
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So we re much less racist, we re much less sexist and so on than we used to be.
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SPEAKER_01
Some people are still racist and some are still sexist, but the spread has shifted.
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SPEAKER_01
The Gaussian distribution has moved and moves steadily as the centuries go by.
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And that is the most powerful
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influence I can see on our moral values, and that doesn t have anything to do with religion.
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I mean, the morals of the Old Testament are Bronze Age morals.
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They re deplorable,
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and they are to be understood in terms of the people in the desert who made them up at the time.
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And so human sacrifice, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, petty revenge, killing people for breaking the Sabbath, all that kind of thing, inconceivable.
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SPEAKER_00
Now.
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So at some point, religious texts may have in part reflected that Gaussian distribution at that time.
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SPEAKER_00
I m sure they did, I m sure they always reflect that, yes.
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SPEAKER_00
And then now, but the sort of, almost like the meme as you describe it, of ideas moves much faster than religious texts do.
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SPEAKER_01
Yes, so basing your morals on religious texts which were written millennia ago,
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is not a great way to proceed.
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SPEAKER_01
I think that s pretty clear.
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SPEAKER_01
So not only should we not get our morals from such texts, but we don t, we quite clearly don t.
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If we did, then we d be discriminating against women and we d be racist, we d be killing homosexuals and so on.
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SPEAKER_01
So we don t and we shouldn t.
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Now, of course, it s possible to,
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to use your 21st century standards of morality, and you can look at the Bible and you can cherry-pick particular verses which conform to our modern morality, and you ll find that Jesus says some pretty nice things, which is great, but
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you re using your 21st century morality to decide which verses to pick, which verses to reject.
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SPEAKER_01
And so why not cut out the middleman of the Bible and go straight to the 21st century morality, which is
2
SPEAKER_01
Where that comes from is a much more complicated question.
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SPEAKER_01
Why is it that morality, moral values change as the centuries go by?
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SPEAKER_01
They undoubtedly do.
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SPEAKER_01
And it s a very interesting question to ask why.
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SPEAKER_01
It s another example of cultural evolution just as technology progresses.
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so moral values progress for probably very different reasons.
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SPEAKER_00
But it s interesting if the direction in which that progress is happening has some evolutionary value, or if it s merely a drift that can go into any direction.
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SPEAKER_01
I m not sure it s any direction, and I m not sure it s evolutionarily valuable.
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SPEAKER_01
What it is is progressive in the sense that each step is a step in the same direction as the previous step.
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SPEAKER_01
So it becomes more gentle, more decent, as by modern standards, more liberal, less violent.
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SPEAKER_00
See, but more decent, I think you re using terms and interpreting everything in the context of the 21st century, because Genghis Khan would probably say that this is not more decent because we re now, you know, there s a lot of weak members of society that we re not murdering.
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SPEAKER_01
Yes, and I was careful to say by the standards of the 21st century,
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By our standards, if we with hindsight look back at history, what we see is a trend in the direction towards us, towards our present value system.
2
SPEAKER_00
So for us, we see progress, but it s an open question whether that won t, you know, I don t see necessarily why we can never return to Genghis Khan times.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, we could.
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SPEAKER_00
I suspect we won t, but
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SPEAKER_01
If you look at the history of moral values over the centuries, it is in a progressive, I use the word progressive not in a value judgment sense, in the sense of a transitive sense.
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SPEAKER_01
Each step is the same direction of the previous step.
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SPEAKER_01
So things like we don t derive entertainment from torturing cats.
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We don t derive entertainment from, like the Romans did in the Colosseum,
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SPEAKER_00
Or rather we suppress the desire to get, I mean, to have pleasure.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s probably in us somewhere.
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SPEAKER_00
So there s a bunch of parts of our brain, one that probably, you know, limbic system that wants certain pleasures and that s.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, I wouldn t have said that, but you re limited to think that way.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, there s a Dan Carlin of Hardcore History that has a really nice explanation of how we ve enjoyed watching the torture of people, the fighting of people, just the torture, the suffering of people throughout history as entertainment until quite recently.
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SPEAKER_00
And now everything we do with sports, we re kind of channeling that feeling into something else.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there is some dark aspects of human nature that are underneath everything.
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And I do hope this like higher level software we ve built will keep us at bay.
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SPEAKER_00
I m also Jewish and have history with the Soviet Union and the Holocaust.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I clearly remember that some of the darker aspects of human nature creeped up there.
2
SPEAKER_01
There have been steps backwards admittedly, and the Holocaust is an obvious one.
2
SPEAKER_01
But if you take a broad view of history, it s in the same direction.
2
SPEAKER_00
So Pamela McCordick in Machines Who Think has written that AI began with an ancient wish to forge the gods.
2
SPEAKER_00
Do you see, it s a poetic description, I suppose, but do you see a connection between our civilization s historic desire to create gods, to create religions, and our modern desire to create technology and intelligent technology?
2
SPEAKER_01
I suppose there s a link between an ancient desire
2
SPEAKER_01
explain away mystery and science, but artificial intelligence creating gods, creating new gods.
2
SPEAKER_01
I forget, I read somewhere a somewhat facetious
2
SPEAKER_01
paper which said that we have a new God is called Google and we pray to it and we worship it and we ask its advice like an oracle and so on.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s fun.
2
SPEAKER_00
You see that as a fun statement, a facetious statement.
2
SPEAKER_00
You don t see that as a kind of truth of us creating things that are more powerful than ourselves.
2
SPEAKER_01
It has a kind of poetic resonance to it, which I get, but I wouldn t have bothered to make the point myself, put it that way.
2
SPEAKER_00
All right.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you don t think AI will become a new religion, a new god?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I can see that the future of intelligent machines or indeed intelligent aliens from outer space
2
SPEAKER_01
might yield beings that we would regard as gods in the sense that they are so superior to us that we might as well worship them.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s highly plausible, I think.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I see a very fundamental distinction between a god who is simply defined as something very, very powerful and intelligent on the one hand, and a god who doesn t need explaining by a progressive step-by-step process like evolution.
2
SPEAKER_01
or like engineering design.
2
SPEAKER_01
So suppose we did meet an alien from outer space who was marvelously, magnificently more intelligent than us, and we would sort of worship it for that reason.
2
SPEAKER_01
Nevertheless, it would not be a god in the very important sense that it did not just happen by
2
SPEAKER_01
to be there like God is supposed to.
2
SPEAKER_01
It must have come about by a gradual, step-by-step, incremental, progressive process, presumably like Darwinian evolution.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s all the difference in the world between those two.
2
SPEAKER_01
Intelligence
2
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design comes into the universe late as a product of a progressive evolutionary process or a progressive engineering design process.
2
SPEAKER_00
So most of the work is done through this slow-moving progress.
2
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but there s still this desire to get answers to the why question, that if the world is a simulation, if we re living in a simulation, that there s a programmer-like creature that we can ask questions of.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, well, let s pursue the idea that we re living in a simulation, which is not totally ridiculous, by the way.
2
SPEAKER_01
There we go.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then you still need to explain the
2
SPEAKER_01
Programmer, the programmer had to come into existence by some, even if we re in a simulation, the programmer must have evolved.
2
SPEAKER_01
Or if he s in a sort of- Or she.
2
SPEAKER_01
Or she.
2
SPEAKER_01
If she s in a meta simulation, then the meta meta programmer must have evolved by a gradual process.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can t escape that.
2
SPEAKER_01
Fundamentally, you ve got to come back to a gradual incremental process of explanation to start with.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s no shortcuts in this world.
2
SPEAKER_00
But maybe to linger on that point about the simulation, do you think it s an interesting, I basically talked to, bored the heck out of everybody asking this question, but whether you live in a simulation, do you think, first, do you think we live in a simulation?
2
SPEAKER_00
Second, do you think it s an interesting thought experiment?
2
SPEAKER_01
It s certainly an interesting thought experiment.
2
SPEAKER_01
I first met it in a science fiction novel by Daniel Galloy called Counterfeit World, in which it s all about, I mean, our heroes are running a gigantic computer which simulates the world and something goes wrong.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so one of them has to go down into the simulated world in order to fix it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then the denouement of the thing
2
SPEAKER_01
the climax to the novel is that they discover that they themselves are in another simulation at a higher level.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I was intrigued by this and I love others of Daniel Gallois  science fiction novels.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then it was revived seriously by Nick Bostrom.
2
SPEAKER_01
Bostrom, talking to him in an hour.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he goes further, not just to treat it as a science fiction speculation, he actually thinks it s positively likely
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I think it s very likely actually.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, he makes like a probabilistic argument which you can use to come up with very interesting conclusions about the nature of this universe.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, he thinks that we re in a simulation.