Invest Like The Best
Episode 140 How to Live with Computers
Invest Like The Best

Episode 140: How to Live with Computers

Invest Like The Best

Episode 140

How to Live with Computers

Brian Christian is the author of Algorithms To Live By and The Most Human Human. We cover the history of artificial general intelligence (AGI), how people should think about the effects of AGI in their careers, and using algorithms and mathematics for big life decisions.

[00:01:11] – (First Question) – Summarizing his collection of interests that led to his three books

[00:01:48] – Biggest questions in AI

[00:02:32] – Defining AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and its history

[00:04:07] – Computing Machinery and Intelligence

[00:06:43] – The idea of the most human human

[00:08:48] – Tactics that have changed the most in learning to be the most human human

[00:14:59] – Tests for measuring AGI and updates made to them

[00:19:01] – Concerns for once we have AGI

[00:24:55] – Self-awareness as a threshold for AGI

[00:30:47] – Skeptics’ take on AGI

[00:36:03] – Advice for people building careers and how AGI will impact work

[00:36:21] – Rise of the Machines and Robots

[00:37:05] – Explore/Exploit trade off

[00:43:46] – How explore/exploit applies to business concepts

[00:47:55] – Impacts of AGI on the economy

[00:51:29] – Highlights from his second book

[00:56:28] – Kindest thing anyone has done for Brian

How to Live with Computers

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.

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