Friedman Interview with Stevenson: What Will You Get In 50 Years? The digital world, physical reality or the integration of Mars?

Lex Fridman | Computer scientist thiab Researcher in artificial intelligence, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Neal Stephenson | Father of Metavers, author of "Avalanche"

In mid-November 2021, computer scientist and MIT intelligence scientist Lex Fridman (Lex Fridman) spoke to Metaverse's father, Neal Stephenson. Virtual reality, explore the meaning of the world.

technology and humanity

Lex Friedman: History keeps repeating itself, and how can it repeat itself?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!This is repeated often. So I think the human situation is like that. So we will see more and more patterns of similar behavior occur. When something new happens, it is an exception, not a natural one.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!What is the technology for? Limit or disclose human status?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!The standard of living and life expectancy have improved considerably, especially over the past 100 years. Like antibiotics, modern vaccines, electricity, and the Internet, they have improved the standard of living and health of most people, making the same human life longer than the historical average. People are living longer and generally in better health. However, we can still see many similarities, some unpleasant (the review shows some bad behavior here).

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Through the use of technology, the removal of human resources has increased. Will the machine open up a better case of the human condition? Will these processes change your way of life on earth?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!For the past ten years I have held onto this idea, but people will find ways to create separation and resentment like WWII.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Can you talk about the lessons you learned from WWII?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!I like to focus on new technologies related to this war, which maybe is not what you are talking about.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!There are a few things worth mentioning. First, there are the weapons. It's technology, but also things like human nature, good and bad. "

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Yes. The result of concentration camps by war does not have the effect of the human body. Everyone should learn a lesson and be a cultural leader. Even in so-called civilized nations, it is important to know that people can easily become demons. So this is the biggest increase.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Can you give me an example?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!You can give examples of future technologies or current devices. New technologies such as Wikipedia. It allows knowledge sharing, editing and publishing which is very efficient. It puts the world's information at their fingertips and allows people to access and search all kinds of information, including true and false information. It will make you a better person.

Future technologies are like intelligence. AI is a helper or a mentor, like a mentor. Of course, you can use Google to find what you need, but you can also use AI to send information to develop on your own. Instead of using procedural algorithms to limit your progress, you use them as helpers, servants, in your research experience.

Yes, it seems like an easy task, but it is very difficult. As I wrote in the book "Age of Diamonds". I have found that people try to solve problems differently. Even though I haven't tried it myself, I can imagine how difficult it was to achieve this goal.

Is it difficult to shelter from the sun?

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!As you said, will it end up being colonized and closed to the sun? Then people will say that we are done. Because when the sun is tired, there is no path to the other galaxies.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!I think getting out of the sun would be a difficult task.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Can you explain Why are you thinking about this big question? Why do you think it is difficult to go out in the sun?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!It's just a matter of counting the energy. You can be slow all the time, but it will take a lot of effort to get to more than one lifetime. In order to slow down in the middle, you have to use the same force. Otherwise you will be killed. This means that you have to carry a lot of energy. There are also some strategies, such as using laser propulsion to transport objects to other galaxies. But there is no way to slow it down.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!To my knowledge, no one has mentioned it ...

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!So if that happens, that's a good thing. The demand for energy is incredible. There are other issues, like how to isolate the ecosystem and how to keep people from going crazy. Also, what if you hit something while traveling in a fast light?

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!For some it's a mix of extended human life, but it's just a community in an old, stable spaceship.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Yes. Now I think that's the only way. It can take a long time. They can get to where they're going and find the wrong sun. We can try some advanced research, but if you go there and find out that every planet in our solar system is a bad planet, we'll be a little disappointed with the thousand year year we just had. To the right?

So we have to measure the narrowness, and in order to survive we have to limit the size and temperature of the Earth, because we have to survive in gravitational space where we can. It looks better when everyone sees this difficult problem as we start to use existing data from the sun to create the environment we need. It's hard to give a finance debate like how much money can be made to do it. One of the reasons I love open space is that people who want to build an interstellar plane and go to another solar system do so by faith. I think that's just why you are doing this, after all it makes more sense to design a cylindrical rotating center and make it perfect for business.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Isn't it all for religion? For example, why do we have to search and why do we have to go to the moon?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!I know a veteran who worked on Project Apollo who once said that Apollo landed on the moon was the most successful part of the celebration.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!It's a battle for meaning, and that meaning never shows. Finding mathematical meanings is difficult. The same goes for music and religion.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!However, some people have done it, but it will not be enough.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!They are the ones who find the meaning in math. They usually look for line points, but in real life they don't. Do you see the future from a price point of view? Did we build this generation of spaceships? Like the ant walk, if you set up a boat every year, you can travel the Milky Way.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!I am not against. But like I said, you have to be passionate to do that. It must be due to some kind of mental illness or insufficiency.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!From an industry perspective. You think you don't have a business model. To the right?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Nothing can be done.

A lot of people are excited to end Mars.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!I have more questions about Elon Musk than about Jeff Bezos. Musk has a big vision for this project. What do you think of the Mars colonization project? What do you think of the people who have the desire to make this impossible, and many of whom say it is impossible?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!See the colonization of Mars as a goal and it's easy to put into words. It is a way of encouraging participants in relation to other activities in which they may not be involved. Plus, Musk's choice is excellent. There are some technical issues. There is a perchlorate problem on the surface of Mars. This is going to be a big deal. There is also the question of electricity. All of this knows.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!About commercial problems? I think it is better to go outside in the sun because of religion. What are the Martian colonies? Can you turn it into a marketing strategy?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!It is hard to imagine what capabilities from Mars could be transported here cheaply and competitively with others. You can dig it up here or you can plant it here. So I don't know if there is a business plan. Technically, we go there and see what happens. There are a lot of people who are passionate about joining Mars, and they are willing to do their best even if they don't have a business plan. So I think it's a good choice.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Musk is someone who comes and goes with his love of exploring the unknown.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!You can also see what Musk did on the flight. For him, this trip was important for the wrong reasons. He is ready to tackle big and demanding projects without thinking too much and putting effort into making decisions. to the right? It was like digging a hole deep in the city.

Rex Liberty:Do you think there is a lot to do in the digital space? Here is Wikipedia and the experience we talked about. Don't you think there will be a lot of success in innovation in the digital space?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!If I hope I can see this, I think a lot of mental health professionals have moved to the digital space in the last few generations. In the past, people could design rockets or some other shape, but now they've got into computing. Now we have a process problem with the way we work with media and it's very heavy. I hope that in the next 10 years it will not be the same.

I enjoy familiarity with the physical world.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!People are terrified of certain arts. Artificial intelligence is one of them. What they fear is not the negative that can happen, but the fact that he cannot predict the negative that will happen. But just as appealing are AI and social media. For some reason when we talk about all the negative influences in the media we forget that connecting the world is great. There is a deep loneliness in all of us, and we need connections. For some, the media reveals the basics of the human body. You think of virtual reality, of mixed reality. What do you think are the implications for the development of virtual reality or mixed reality?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!I have been a Senior Futurist for 5 years at Magic Leap. I have a small team in Seattle that does content research and development to create content for AR. Build an AR system that can make it all work. This is very attractive and needs to be done in real time. But that alone is a big deal.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!First, virtual reality is about creating a virtual world that is almost different from the real world. Augmented reality puts real world objects on top of them. This means that in real time, the device must be able to capture and identify whatever it is capable of reproducing in the world. So you can put things on it and do it in real time, not only real time, but also to create a sense of human imagination.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!This is only one of the requirements of the system. It also follows your eyes to let you know what you are looking at. It does all of that work and should be continued without burning the processor or draining the battery too quickly. Anything you want to add must follow it. It needs to be done with low enough latency and high precision that it's really good, and you won't feel dizzy and nauseous.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Like you said, it's a great place. What kind of charm doesn't for the best engineering needs?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!We have a great team in Wellington, New Zealand who have developed a game called "Invaders" to unleash the potential of AR games. I created a "Green Kids" application. The game will eventually model the application for deaf children and will be adapted to an application program for future users. It's the environment and it's part of life, not just sitting there and playing like a video.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Yes it was recently changed to 'Baby Goat', what is the purpose of breeding dogs and cats? An environment like this never helps you do anything, but it enriches your life. So, in the next 50 years, who will be the winner? Virtual reality, augmented reality or physical reality?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!I have always been a fan of AR. This is a simple answer. If you wear an AR device and place the assistive device on your head, it becomes a VR device. If you block out what's really there, what you see is VR.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!But when you are working on something like real life, virtual reality allows you to step into a fantasy world.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!So, in such a fantastic world, there is always a problem with vertigo. If the body gets too fast, and the interior is different from the senses, it becomes infected, which VR developers shouldn't study.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!So, do you think it will be like in the future we spend most of our time in virtual reality? Do you feel like you are moving further and further away from your physical reality?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Maybe it's for some use, just for fun. You have to know how to make a difference, personally, I don't think that what is interesting is the same as marketing. A lot of people will love spending more time in VR, but personally I want to learn more about improving the physical world because the physical world is so cold.

Artificial intelligence must be integrated with humans

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!I have a question on intelligence. Can intellectual property expand into the community in the coming years? Have you thought about this?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!I don't think much about this question because it is a very deep subject. And I don't think I know this very well. AI seems to be a term used for a lot of different things. I think we can think of the problem from the bottom up of the confusion rather than top down by starting with the big picture.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!More precisely, we can speak of complete AI systems. One is the language standard and GPT3. This means that you can read and learn a lot of human-made content. Read online and create lots of text. They may have neural networks powerful enough to communicate with people based on reading human language. Now the bots from Boston Dynamics, and most of the quadrupeds, and most of the bots are very dumb.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!I think what humans haven't explored enough in robotics is human-robot interaction, the concepts that robots bring to humans. I think it will have a huge impact on the future. Most people think AI needs super intelligence to make an impact. I think we have to have an impact when people are healthy and a lot of things are happening. even if they are stupid.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!When we meet people we talk about these things, they are smart, they can be toxic, and they are almost lifeless. The robot decides to get close to this and create an interesting world. I have a question like this. Mirror yourself, especially when it appears. Like everyone else, we are friends and mentors of ourselves. We teach each other and through these processes our relationship grows. In the future, we will explore in-depth and useful information, now is the time for robots and tech experts.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!I think the main robot application is just to sit and do nothing. When you hear the door close, you can turn to see what the door looks like. When the robot turns around at the same time to see the door. It means your feelings are the same.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!But when they hear the door close, they hear the same voice, but no one. You can start with a robot that clearly hears the door closing.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!One example I can think of is when I was in college, sitting in a restaurant and dining out with a group. we just met Someone might have an interesting story or something happened. Then, in the meantime, you can see the eye with the stranger outside the table. At that point, you will know who this person is responding to. This man heard what I heard. Their reaction is the same as mine. No one understands the joke or what just happened. But some random stranger in there, I tie into that, and you build for that. The next time something happens, you will make new friends. You just saw new friends and they turn to you. You are on the same channel.

cryptocurrency utopia

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!In 1999 he released "Cryptography", and by the late 1990s he had basically developed a cryptocurrency. How do you see this setup and what do you see in cryptocurrency? How does it play out differently from what you think? The machine itself becomes a human side, a hacker, a financier, a powerful person, a powerless person.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Cryptocurrency existed before blockchain. What I saw was a vaccine from cypherpunks in the Berkeley Bay area. Some have branches in Austin. Many of their ideas are based on the fact that physical bodies exist in the world without government interference. You can't achieve this freedom on the Internet just through math, you really have to have a room with a server, and the government can't intervene. From this perspective, people have worked hard to identify areas to determine where performance stands.

For some time now Anguilla, an island in the Caribbean, has received a lot of attention due to its many special laws. There is also the land and the sea, which are the foundations of the North Sea. A lot of people are trying to find physical entities that look secure, but with the advent of blockchain all of that is gone. It changed the status quo in many ways. Existing systems are more interesting to exploit because they provide a world where hackers can roam and create server rooms.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!There are many servers, is it a central service provider?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!The new problem is that you have to do a lot of math and make sure your GDP isn't contagious. Manufacturers in Iceland or in container shipping or elsewhere under the sea. So the third step in this is beyond the initial step. We're going to build these systems and make money one way or another, but we're lacking a happy medium. I think now we have entered the stage where the Bitcoin blockchain appears and people know how it works. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies exist and are used by humans.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Do you have any ideas on all of this? For example, can these skills be aimed at distribution and finance?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!It's a big problem. I was a little cynical. When it gets big enough, financial and energy companies will control it. In my opinion, money itself is not very attractive in the tech world. In my opinion, the crypto and usable contracts and organizations created by these bases will change a lot more. But that's because we already have the money. This is an old process, but often digitized by credit card companies.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Make it appropriate and conceivable, for example by attaching small contracts to attached data. The combination of information, information of all kinds and all things in the world makes the contracted information of human beings. Approval can be obtained based on actual data and your perception of the data. It would be an interesting challenge if we could create a split in the votes. Will Dogecoin rule the world?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!I don't pay a lot of other money. I have heard these pieces, I am also this story.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!So what's interesting about Dogecoin is that it's a smart contract and it can withstand banks and everything in between. Dogecoin works more in the area of ​​translation and entertainment. Does it mean and fun in the future, much more than boring, outdated and technical, are we going to play in the amusement park? It was like a mighty force with comfort and security, everyone had shelter, food and basic needs met when the foundation was laid. I will be working in a fun place.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Good things will soon be popular.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Just as Bitcoin stands for money, a major financial tool, Dogecoin stands for Fun. It is very interesting to watch the battle online to see which side wins. Because fun is like governing online. 100 years later, is this the essence of the Internet's development, or was it a temporary phenomenon when the Internet was born? This was only true in recent years until time was up. After a man got into an argument, he got angry again.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!At first, I thought people deserved to make a decision, and then they were persecuted by people. I think it's almost unstoppable.

we are a unique world

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Integrated intelligence appears to be one of the key characteristics of Homo sapiens. That is, the ability to share feelings and keep them in mind. The explanation is one of the key points. Maybe the message itself is easier. Because the story has to be told, they can change over time.

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Maybe they can change it. So sometimes in the writing world I think there are a lot of places that are considered bad or used. I like to read which is lively, interesting and pleasant. When you have a good story and people want to read it, you have the freedom to do whatever they want within the story.

At the heart of every story is preventing the reader from doubting. There are many causes and short stories that can break this down. When it is broken, it is difficult to recover. Usually, this is the end result. Someone is closing the book and will never open it again.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!Now that we have solved some of the big unrealistic questions in our work, what does it mean? What is the purpose of life?

Neil Stevenson: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!As far as I know we are the specials all over the world. There is no evidence that there is anything in the universe other than our brain. We seem special. One of the reasons I love David Deutsch, especially his book The Beginning of Infinity, is that he talks about the power of translation. In fact, most successes consist of a series of doctrines that are static and happen in a certain way and pass the doctrine from generation to generation unchanged. But things change dramatically when people have research, understanding, or another perspective.

Lex Friedman: 5 million fans are waiting for you on Webtalk!This driving force is also the world created to understand itself. An interesting and unique part of what we have created. We seem to be forgetful, very special people, fall in love and start a war. So it's not a question of the individual, it's like a concert that everyone attends.