Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
My guest this week is Brian Christian, the author of two of my favorite recent books, Algorithms To Live By and The Most Human Human. Our conversation covers the present and future of how humans interact with and use computers. Brian's thoughts on the nature of intelligence and what it means to be human continue to make me think about what work and life will be like in the future. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Computer Science & Philosophy
Patrick
I'd love to begin with some framing from you around just what your general interest is that unites the first two books that you've written and published and the third that you're working on now. How would you sum up your set of interests?
Brian
I think I have this very on paper, eclectic, academic background, wherein college I studied computer science and philosophy. And then I went to graduate school for creative writing. And I remember at the time raising a lot of eyebrows at family reunions, and so forth. People saying, so you're studying computer science, this very precise, exacting engineering discipline and philosophy like this abstract, vague field, how do these two things connect? Increasingly, people don't ask me that question and I think we're perhaps just coincidentally living through the great synthesis of computer science and philosophy. That as the sort of computational metaphor for mind becomes increasingly literal, we've developed these neural networks, for example, starting in the 1940s, through this analogy to the way that the nervous system work and are now discovering in the last 10 years that this is the best mechanism that we know of for actually implementing AI. Which maybe shouldn't surprise us that we are rediscovering what evolution found after millions of years of trial and error.