Michael Nielsen on Collaboration, Quantum Computing, and Civilization's Fragility

24:09They're not going to be a match. As the years passed, do you think your probability for God existing is going up or down? Which type of God are you referring to here? You're a thing to like a Abrahamic God or what? No, not a particular religion, but some explanation that would seem to stand prior to and outside of what we call physics and would be mystical in some way. Yeah, it's been, that hasn't changed since I was seven years old. But that's weird that it hasn't changed, right? Why shouldn't you've learned a lot? Why shouldn't it change? In whichever direction? I suppose I learned, I had explained to me three basic theories of cosmology when I was seven, one of which was the Big Bang, and then there were two others, which were steady state theory and a third, whose name I don't even remember anymore.

24:53And they leave some questions unanswered. Why is there anything? But as far as I can tell, we haven't made any progress on sort of those things in the 40 odd years since. Yeah, it's frustrating, actually, that's the case. I mean, I think you're correct to say, you've learned a lot, why haven't you changed? And my response to that is, I've learned a lot, because it's really annoying that it hasn't impacted that question more. I think my PE has gone up a modest amount over time. So when I was saying my young 20s, I thought physics was going to make more progress than it has at fundamental theoretical levels.

25:32And the fact that it hasn't nudges me a bit to wonder, well, these other types of explanations that I was not so keen on, maybe they're a bit more more important than I had thought. That hasn't happened with you? No. The thing that that that's an interesting, it hasn't really. I think I just don't think 40 years is very long. If it had been 100 ,000 years, I'd, I'd, but it's all I've got in a sense. I mean, I'm, I know. I'm going to have a bit more, but hopefully yes. My opinion time span is going to be 40 plus something. I think my appreciation for God has gone way up. Like, you know, I appreciate the construction of the religions far more than I did, what sort of notions of God do for people, vastly more appreciative.

26:15But my probability, I don't think, is really changed. And what about evolutionary frameworks, where there's some Darwinian process, some kinds of universes within a broader metaverse, they reproduce at greater frequencies, that shapes the properties of what we live in. Isn't that a kind of substitute for a good explanation, and that rises in probability just a bit? No, I mean, why not? It's, you're relabeling what you mean by universe. If you just sort of use a term that means everything that is, then that hasn't changed it. Our model of what it might be has potentially changed quite a bit over the last few decades.

26:51But maybe there's a simple theory for the metaverse, but we can never ever see it. It's like a master's religion. And then our own universe, there's not a simple theory, but we do know the parameter values we got are enough to ragged across the finish line and that takes some of the burden of physics in a way just like well the platypus it seems an unlikely creature but it has in fact survived. Okay you're just sort of saying that some of the things that seem arbitrary and being in good Australian you appreciate the platypus right? The platypus quite a bit it's good for fooling visiting Americans about whether or not this animal can exist or not.

27:24Yes I still don't find that compelling I think because there's always we've always known that there seem likely to be fairly contingent facts about the universe. I mean, it shifts the level at which they are. It's more interesting if the value of the fine structure constant is actually a contingent fact. That is interesting. Or if some of the coupling other coupling constants are changing over time or sort of models like this. But it's not particularly, it's still not getting at the essential question from my point of view, which is why is there something rather than nothing? That I've long thought is an impossible question.

27:55So we might have theories of parameter values or be able to predict how things interact or what happened a long time ago. But the Heideggerian question, I don't think it's a meaningful question at all. Because the word Y is already embedded in some context, which it sends a self -undercutting query. Open science, why do some fields have pre -print platforms and others not? Is there an actual regularity or is that random and path -dependent? I think a lot of that probably comes down to individuals. My favorite things, a year ago, before they'd started to spread in biology, I would ask, often ask physicists and biologists this question.

28:36And why is there preprints in physics but not in biology? And the biologists would say, well, biology is so much more competitive than physics that we can't possibly bear to share our results too early. And the physicists would say, physics is so much more competitive than biology that we have to share them as rapidly as possible to get the word out. But with COVID, didn't biology go the root, early sun parts of biology go the root of physics? And it just seems like it's just a cultural problem. You know, it turns out it's a little bit more like fashion or something like that. It does need to be solved.

29:07Like if you look at what was done in the early days of the physics pre -print server, some very clever things, actually things which are reflected in some of my favorite economists, some of their ideas were done by Paul Ginsburg when he was starting up the pre -print server. He went very narrow. He didn't try and solve the problem all across all the fields. And he went and kind of twisted the arms at some level of some very high status, high profile physicists to say, you know, I would like you to use this service, send me your best paper. So on the first day, which is named Andy Strombinger, who I think is at Harvard, you know, was on the pre -print server and Ed Witten showed up very quickly.

29:40So these are very prominent people. And you get this sort of just, it's a tiny community, but then you can sort of, you can, you can agglomerate. You can start to attach other communities. But that was just, That's a very contingent fact about history. It could have happened in some subdiscipline of biology as well. Why does so many crummy journals survive? They can be quite expensive. You might also have to pay to publish in them. They seem terrible. That if a good piece were in them, the journal would not certify the piece. If anything, the piece would help certify the journal. Why can't we get out of that?

30:13I mean, there's a complicated set of things going on. One is that libraries pay not individuals usually for subscriptions. They're not actually that really the person getting the utility is not the same as the person as the person making the buying decision. That's always bad. There's also the fact that since the 1990s and the rise of the internet, we get economies of scale. You don't subscribe. Libraries don't subscribe to individual journals for the most part. They subscribe to all these giant bundles, which is actually a terrific idea at some level. It's a way of passing on economies of scale and publication to the customers, but it does go some way to explaining why these crummy journals persist.

30:52But you think in part libraries are inefficient at capturing rents for themselves. Did they get this budget? They spend it on bad journals. It might be better for the world if they just took the money home and bought ice cream. Or did whatever. Yeah. Yeah. There's many other things that could be done with that money. It's difficult for them to reason about having talked to many librarians. They will do things like they will use impact factor. I mean, that's the differentiator that they tend to use. So they'll try and get all impact factor, whatever it is, and above journals. That's the kind of the way they seem to think.

31:23They're just using very imperfect proxy. They understand, as well as anybody, that the proxy is imperfect, but they don't have anything better to do as far as I can tell. So it's a very unfortunate situation. And right now, how high are the marginal returns to greater openness? So put aside terrorists, manufacturing, new pathogens, put aside people figuring out how to make their own nuclear weapons, AI problems. So putting aside the very negative, just if the good stuff were more open, how much more rapidly would science progress? Openness per se, I mean that's a very weak word. You need to be sort of much more specific.

31:59If you look at say the culture around Jupyter notebooks in machine learning, I think having those very openly available and widely available really has driven a lot of progress. You can just write your Jupyter Notebook with your experiment. You make it available to other people, and that can really drive a lot of progress. It's not the same as making your journal article available. It's a much more active kind of a material. Do I think that that is an important component in really significantly speeding up science? Yes. But it's not going to be 2X. I think that there's much larger than 2X possible, and this is a piece of that.

32:34Yeah. But it's not 2X on its own. No, it's actually it's too undefined to term. Openness is always with respect to what platform, with respect to what set of institutions, with respect to what set of norms, with the current sets of norms and institutions that we have, it buys you a little bit, I don't think it buys you that much, but the norms and institutions, they're going to change in response, the way in which people work will change in response. I mean, the Jupyter Notebook example I gave is I think a good example of that. Why are science textbooks so expensive? Is it marginal cost? Is it third -party payment problems?

33:07Is it something else? I don't. Is it instructor lock -in because the notes are geared to the text they've worked with for 15 years? Yeah. Very few professors make that much money from the textbooks that they write, but they're often very protective. I see people complaining on Twitter that they're not going to get the $400 check next year for their textbook under a new open access policy and they're really up and arms about this $400. That's interesting. It's hard for me to empathize with psychologically. I don't understand. I mean, a priori, I wrote this neural nets textbook which I put online for free and that massively, I mean, that's really made a really large difference to the impact which it's had.

33:52In fact, even if I just think purely financially, it wasn't, I wasn't doing it thinking, oh, financially, this will be better off, but the greater impact has actually benefited me much more financially than any amount of royalties ever would. You mean like giving talks or being invited? Yeah. And just in general, people know who you are, what you've done, what you're interested in, and they're much more likely to provide all sorts of different opportunities, including jobs. I think from the point of view of the authors, it really actually doesn't make that much sense. From the point of view of the publishers, it might make more sense.

34:21They can make a... I mean, the textbook market is not huge, but it is multi -billions. You have a well -known article with Patrick Hollison on progress in science slowing down. And it's published at a point, say, right before mRNA vaccines, right before GPT -4, other developments. Right. How well can we know the progress of science at any point in time? Isn't there often, and everything all at once, effect? And in fact, those years we were building up and investing in things that very suddenly then flourished? Yeah, it's amusing to think about different points at time, which you could right, try and write the same article, probably the years before the princopia you would have been able to do the same thing.

35:02There is some question about what certain types of institution make possible. Actually, I don't know. I think really the higher it be in my response is going to be something like, I just think AI is not yet 100 % clear, but I think it's very likely to drive a lot of scientific progress over the next few years. And that's just a case of, we're moving so much of our cognition and eventually also the actuators the way we operate in the world, out into these devices where all of a sudden it becomes much more mutable and hopefully improvable. Do you think the private sector wages of scientists are a good proxy for progress in science?

35:39I think if science is declining in value, you would think scientists would be paid less and less, but over the last 40 years, mostly those wages haven't fallen. I don't think it's a good... Isaac Newton wasn't the richest person to ever live, but he probably did more for a human understanding than any of these. But there's more of a market now. The Isaac Newton of today would probably be pretty wealthy. Einstein, who'd have been wealthy had he done more media, right? But he wouldn't have been wealthy for what he did well. But still his wage would have reflected his fame. He could have endorsed ski boots and other things.

36:15Well, famously he asked for $3 ,000 a year when he moved to the IAS and they gave him 15. I think he wasn't very good at negotiating. But just say that the ages for private sector pharmaceuticals, they seem to go up for quite a while. When the drug pipeline seemed slow, should we have inferred from that? Well, we're building up to some big things, some blockbusters or not. Yeah. This is a question for you, Tyler. Well, that's fine. That's a name asking right. Good reason to do so. I think I'm inclined to think. And there's always this interesting balance. Actually, AI is a really interesting example at this point in time.

36:49There's this theory which has become widely believed to almost everybody that scaling is very important. Scaling is a very capital -friendly story. So it actually moves some of the power and the negotiating power from individual researchers, I think, to the centers of capital. But it is just a story. I think it's quite interesting that it, in some sense, gives the individual researchers less negotiating power. Whether or not this is going to eventually result in a diminished ability to build personal brands and then capture value from that. I don't know. I'm really interested actually to see what will happen over the next few years.

37:23It used to be that the big companies published a lot of papers very openly and that is gradually going away and as that goes away it damages the individual researchers because they're not able to build their brands publicly in that way. They're not as easily able to say, I am the person who did. But this is a small city, doesn't everyone know? I dinner with a bunch of AI researchers last night, they all seem to know each other's relative importance. Yeah, I mean, and you look at their salary, so there's rumors. They're doing fine. The top researchers can be offered five to ten million dollars a year.

37:56Those must be some of the highest science salaries ever, and you're saying, AI is such a big thing. You've seen it to be coming down on the side of the wages predicting something. I think so much money is going in and it's going in on the basis of brand to some extent. And we've hired such and such a person who did such and such a thing. And if that can make your company valuation go up by a few hundred million dollars, then offering them another extra million dollars a year makes sense. But I don't have a grant. This is all local storytelling. Sure. It's not grand theory of what's actually going on.

38:31I haven't thought it through in enough detail to have any confidence there. Now you're working on what I think you call the vulnerable world hypothesis. Yes? That's what Dick Bostrom, yeah, that's his term. What do you think is the cost at which a nuclear weapon could destroy a city? So if that costs only $50 ,000, it seems to me the world's in big, big trouble pretty quickly. What's that cost level where you get very, very nervous? So if it's $10 billion, maybe things are fairly safe. If it's $50K, we're done for. What's the threshold? It's a cost and expertise, but let's say the expertise is comparable.

39:08So somebody who has 50k is probably able to get the expertise as well. Right. Yeah, that's not great. That's my fundamental worry with a without AI. That just that cost becomes low. Honestly, I mean, there's some question about what exactly mean by nuclear weapon? Like, is it portable? Is it? It would render a mid -sized city uninhabitable for a few decades. So I'm very least sort of a multi -megaton, but not necessarily. It would make the headlines. It would make the headlines. A very small nuclear bomb will make the headlines if detonated. Yeah, I mean, if we're getting down to hundreds of thousands of dollars, the issue is the issue is right.

39:43Nuclear weapons are terrible, but they're not civilization threatening directly. Sure, but enough of these go off like they can certainly be destabilizing. That's a yeah, be like the fall of the Roman Empire, maybe worse. Yeah, that's what it starts to seem like. But in what year do you think that the cost will be low enough that that happens? I mean, at this point, I don't have a good sense. I suppose I'm actually more concerned about other threats. But if this is a - My safety is the obvious thing. I wouldn't call it a certain threat. But if you simply think technology will advance. He's the thing, like the nuclear non -proliferation treaty means that we actually have a lot of controls of the ability to produce fissile material.

40:24But that's like League of Nations, right? Ultimately. Yeah, I mean, it is. It's really coming out of that same sort of, yeah, we have this cartel of whatever it is, ten countries or something. It'll fail when the cost is low. It will eventually fail, but that's many decades away. But you have reason to think we're going to last a thousand years and it's civilized today, not every person dead, but I think getting off planet earth and establishing a civilization elsewhere is very, very important. Yeah. Very hard for economic reasons. Yes, but utterly crucial. Robots in a sense make it harder because you could send robots to Mars is to do whatever might be economically useful there means you never work hard on having humans do it.

41:06Yeah, that's true. I mean, we're pretty curious. But the robot will take perfect footage. Whatever is there, the robot will send back to us. You'll have your whatever is the current version of Apple Vision Pro, right? It will see very realistic. You're an economist. I'm a romantic, I think. Might be the difference. But we'd have to settle them at scale. So 20 people on Mars limping along. Oh, it'll be like a million people, not 20 people. But if we can do a million, we can do a billion, I would think. Sure, sure. You want to get, it's still not going to be, it's not going to be self - what's the right term.

41:41It's not going to be an otaku or whatever the right term is. It's not going to be completely self -sustaining. Sustaining that at a million people, it's doing a lot of the, it has a lot of the civilizational infrastructure. And so I think that's the right sort of scale. Casey Hanmer is a nice book. I think it's had a build a city of a million people on Mars or something like that which I think is it's way too optimistic in many of its assumptions but he's got the right scale. Economics aside, what's the main scientific constraint that has to be overcome? Is it gravity? Is it effective radiation on the human body?

42:11Is it water? I mean to some extent we're not going to know until we go there was this great experiment done a few years ago where there was a pair of twins one went up into space for a year, the other one stayed on Earth. So there was the first Just time we actually got to do a controlled or somewhat controlled study where we see what the impact of being in space for a long period of time does to a human body. And I mean they just discovered so many things. This is still below the Van Allen belts as well. So we don't, I mean we just don't, we just don't know the answer to those questions. What's going to, there's a whole bunch of problems.

42:42The regolith on Mars is terrible for human beings. I'm sure that the logravity is going to be bad for them. What else is there, there's shortages of, there's nitrogen fortunately, which we don't have on the moon. So you're making me think, civilization as we know it won't last a thousand years. No, I also have a lot of faith in long -run economic growth. Basically, at the moment for us to go to Mars is, you know, very, very, very expensive given the return or to establish a permanent human presence in space. If we continue to have economic growth, the relative cost is just going to keep going down.

43:16At some point, it's actually not going to be that difficult. Does a vulnerable world, me near universal surveillance? Unfortunately, I think probably yes. Doesn't that then become the great point of vulnerability? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's half you could ban universal surveillance from here on out forever. Would you press that button? No, I mean, I think, you know, the history of justice to some extent. So the term surveillance, it's funny. It has negative connotations. people, you know, they think of Bentham and the Panopticon and the Gulagapalago and the Stasi and all these things. But in fact, our ability to supply justice is dependent upon having a good understanding of what has occurred in the present and in the past.

44:03So to these things. But maybe it needs opaqueness as well. It's this optimal mix of surveillance and opaqueness. That you actually have some latitude to break certain laws to misbehave that keeps the system stable, limits the abuses of power, limits how much power the powerful have over us. Yeah, there has to be some sort of Madisonian point of view where you're bringing the powerful institutions into conflict with each other. We do that very imperfectly at the moment, you know, ideas like search warrants and things like this, they're supposed to be checks and balances, but it seems like the organizations which do the of balance are too powerful.

44:44They don't have as strong enough checks on them. I don't know with a, just as a practical matter, the United States is capable of doing this well. I'd be much more comfortable if it was certain other countries. And a strong AI future, where do the economies of scale lie? Say within your lifetime, not 500 years from now. I'm not sure if you're pointing to what you're pointing to. Well, we're all trying to figure out how AI will shape the future, right? So one model is everything is supplied competitively, maybe a bit like fast food today. I suspect that's not true, but it could be true. This is the oligopoly model.

45:23There's the one company races ahead of the others, and then its own AI does R &D at an accelerated pace and they stay ahead forever. Or there's one country, one company, one something controls all the chips. Where do you see the monopoly power evolving? Because it's essential, I think, the predictions of the model. I mean, when I talk to people who know much more than I do, they all point a day a sml has having been surprisingly hard to duplicate, you know, just the ability to... It's not so much do the lithography, but do the lithography at scale, which seems to be very, very... So we should be long Netherlands.

45:56Probably. Yeah. Yeah. That would be an amazing conclusion. It would be an amazing conclusion, but return to the Dutch Renaissance. So it's like agriculture and lithography. and drawing on 17 services. Human services maybe. That's right. Yeah, the return of the Mia. Yeah, yeah. What do you think of the Netherlands as a country? Oh, I love it. I've never spent, well actually, I spent a month there, one, who am I kidding? That's a lot of time. That's a fair amount of time in Liderne, actually. It's a lovely place. It has many problems, of course. I mean, their altitude is not great. In some ways, actually, it's good.

46:33Yeah, they're an interesting sort of a test case. They show what a strong determined civilization can do in response to nature. Yeah, I like the flatness of it. I like the water being everywhere, not everywhere, but most parts, at least of western Netherlands. I find that very attractive. This stereotype I sometimes encounter people sort of view it as being a little orderly. I've heard people say it's dull, but actually I think some of the most interesting experiences of my life were there. I went to a, it was like a jamboree in the field. It was a five days long called Hacking at Random. In 2011, where some people from anonymous spoke, a whole bunch of cryptographers spoke, it was really sort of hacker culture.

47:17And it was just intellectually wild in the most interesting way. And it really, it grew out of Dutch hacker culture. I think there's a lot of, you know, that spirit of the Dutch chrenison still still still visible. How would you describe the quality of this conversations? What were they like different than what's in San Francisco? Oh yeah. How are they different? They're not captured by capital to the same extent. Conversation to San Francisco, particularly with younger people, tend to be extremely idealistic and often very prosocial. But then later there's this sort of negotiation that goes on where they need access to capital to make the dreams come true.

47:56a certain amount of compromise is made, although they also often keep a lot of their original sort of pro -social and idealistic character. In the Netherlands, in those particular events, there have been less of that. They also have less access to capital. Yeah. If someone's gonna travel to the Netherlands, they have a tech background. Like what should they do or what advice do you have? How should they try to learn more from the Netherlands? It's been years since I've been there. So I'm not the right person. But since you have good memory through space repetition. Yeah, maybe. I mean, yeah, I love going to the museums in in in Amsterdam just partially I remember on is maybe my my my favorite painter that that's a yeah, it's hard actually to think of anything else but I think of the Netherlands.

48:40Yeah, yeah, other than Rembrandt's late self -portraits, which I think are some of the most extraordinary things that have done. Let's say we all had better memories. How big is the social gain there? Is there any social gain at all? So you've been in an advocate of space repetition for improving your memory. It works for medical students, it probably works for languages, but are there social gains, especially with AI coming? Well, I'm not actually, I wouldn't say I was an advocate. But you do it. I do it. And you teach other people how to do it. I get benefits from it. And some other people get benefits from it.

49:11And I'm very enthusiastic if they do. And if they don't, lots of people try it and are like, this isn't working for me. Well, stop doing it. Same as, you know, if you listen to Bach and don't like it, stop listening to Bach. to what extent do I think? There are these interesting, there's a long sequence of papers sort of trying to elucidate the connection between deep sort of practical expertise and the role of memory, I suppose most famously, people like Herbs Eimon and Anders Erickson and people like this have tried to understand what relationship if any. It's a little bit murky, they all make very strong claims about an expert as somebody who's acquired sort of 50 ,000 chunks of information and things like this.

49:51They're nice stories. They certainly seem to be born out, but I don't know what the causal thing is. If I talk to you about economics, you can tell me, well, actually not, not just an astounding number of things about economics, but about a lot of different things. But I don't know, are you an expert because you know those things or is it downstream of something? Yeah, is it really downstream of something else? I'm sure it's part of it. If you had a magic memory, it might help you a little bit. But I suspect actually it's downstream of something else. your determination, curiosity, something like that.

50:21Some evidence that students learn better when they take notes of what's being said. Do you feel there's something for some people with memory a bit similar, but until they have memorized it, it's less real for them? I don't just mean that they remember it more, but the initial impact somehow is created or defined by the later act of memorization, like people who take trips and until they photograph something that don't feel they've seen it. Yeah, in fact, they probably didn't, they very likely didn't see it. Perhaps, yeah. It's probably part of the reason why I take photos. I will look more closely.

50:52That seems to be part of the reason I will take notes. It is part of the reason why I do space repetition. It provides me with another way of paying attention to the world. Those things are very valuable, right? Like any general purpose strategy you have, which will cause you to pay attention to the world, is incredibly valuable. And so I collect things like that. Yeah, why did I say yes to coming on the podcast? A huge part of it is because I know it's gonna make me pay attention in different ways. I know that you're gonna ask me questions that nobody else is gonna ask me. And so for me, like the reason I do space repetition and the reason I will come on a podcast with somebody like you who asks very interesting questions, it's kind of the same.

51:34But in some other ways, you're a fan of non -legibility, as am I, had other margins. And there's some tension because when you take the photo, when you remember something, when you write it down, there's less legibility. And there's no tension at all there. You're constantly expanding the legible. And when you do that, there's this sort of penumbra of illegibility that surrounds it. That moves, but it gives you access to those other spaces. You know, you go to the Netherlands, you travel in general, you make more of the world's culture, you make people much more legible to yourself. But that expands what you're able to see as well at the edge of that.

52:11That's part of the reason for doing it. That's part of the reason for wanting to make things legible. What's underrated about travel other than that? Oh my God. Almost everything. You denied saying this, but somebody once said to me that travel is the only education, and it's really stayed with me as expressing some deep truth. I think mostly just the world is so incredibly deep. Absolutely. There's 8 billion people. It's the only way to see that depth and breadth. Yeah, and it's just unbelievable. I mean, you pick almost a random person anywhere, you could spend a great year with them, just learning things.

52:44And you can't unfortunately do that eight billion times. Yes, it's very, very undirated. It's been very undirated in my life. I haven't traveled nearly as much as I should. Why is the midway aircraft carrier? Why is that so interesting? There are many reasons. That's in San Diego, right? It is, yeah. So for about 10 years, It was probably the most dangerous object in the world. It carried nuclear weapons, I believe. Having 5 ,000 people on it, basically, you have, people have been making objects like that for, well, centuries, many centuries. They keep getting better at it. There's so much sort of built knowledge built into that environment.

53:22It expresses so much very deep expertise, and then you have four, or 4 ,500 people, or completely dedicated to a single purpose, they all care an enormous amount about this purpose. They don't suffer like large organizations, have all kinds of bloat and all kinds of problems. So many of those problems are gone away there, but partially because when you're on a boat, it's not so easy to empire build, like there's real reasons to trim fat. You have amazing sort of unity of purpose, what the captain or what the admiral, there was both on the boat, say, that goes. you're not arguing about what the right corporate strategy is.

53:57So you have incredible clarity. You have incredible belief in this purpose. It actually is a high purpose, in their case, talking to some of the sailors. They felt very strongly, they were protecting a civilization that they cared about a great deal. They speak with so much pride about it. So it's almost sort of the perfect floating civilization in some regards. It's just immensely interesting. Here's something you went throughout, and I quote, So the great talent identifiers I know or know of all seem very idiosyncratic. They're rather like Michelin chefs. This is getting us back to the tension between the opaque and the legible.

54:33Why do you think that's true, that they're idiosyncratic? Personally, it's just because the boundaries of knowledge at any given time tend to be idiosyncratic almost by definition. Like, they haven't been commoditized yet. There is a best person at making superconducting circuits in the world. there is a best person. Toma Shelling, I think, was your PhD supervise? Yes. When you reach Shelling, you realise that some of the things he did, he did very well, and he must have been remarkable to talk to him, but he's a little bit illegible. That's right. Even though he's a very, very... And he was when you would speak to him as well.

55:05Oh, bet he was. That's the part of the value. You're like, oh, this person is actually out on the edge of civilization. And I think that people who are good at identifying people who are able to expand boundaries like that, like they need to have some sense of that edge. And here's a question you wanted me to ask you, quote, you initially were skeptical of emergent ventures, but you've changed your mind and become enthusiastic about it. What caused the switch? And what would you change about emergent ventures? I mean, the biggest single thing is just empirical. I've met a bunch of EV grantees.

55:38I've encouraged a bunch of people to apply as some of whom you've given grants to. And they're great. Also, you haven't funded in the way I might have expected. I was talking to somebody. I've actually forgotten who it is. And they clearly had some sort of socialist, quite anti -libertarian ideas. And you've given them a grant and I thought, it might have been a mistake, of course. So typically, Tyler, like he's trying to figure out, do they actually believe in this idea? Do they actually really care? And then you don't mind that certainly not coming to the Maccadus Center to carry forward the libertarian flag.

56:12And somehow I think seeing so many people who are doing very worthwhile things, which have no, or very little institutional chance of support being amplified, that I care about a great deal. And I mean, it seems like Evie is one of the places that is doing that the best, that really, yeah. What do you think we can do to attract more non -legible, but excellent people? Find other people like yourself. Well, they're going to be like you in this abstract way, but actually very unlike you in other ways. And I think about, I don't know, people like Stuart Brand and people like that in the past who've just been wonderful at talent identification, but they're not identifying the same kind of talent as you.

57:01To some extent, they become human marketplaces as well. Like they're actually, they're out of crossroads, they're connecting people to opportunity. That's a very special type of a person. and I maybe met five to 10 people in my life who seemed like that. Well, really strongly. Here's something else you wrote in my quote, I internalized a lot of Ivan Eliyich, John Holt, AS Neal, and Paulo Freire as a kid. What did you mean? You were talking, I think, in the context of agency, but how did that shape you? At the time, as a 12 or 13 year old, it mostly probably made me insufferable to my parents because I hated school already.

57:38That's a good thing, right? It gave me a real way of expressing that, and they dealt with me very patiently. I think over the long term, the most important of those was, for many years I would have said, ill -etched. Maybe still say ill -etched. And basically, his point is about the question, it's about the question of what's the relationship between human beings and institutions and how paternalistic are those institutions towards the humans. So, in Discoaling Society, he really makes the point that in fact schools do not treat children as human, to some extent, at all. Denies the most basic kinds of agency.

58:18And just thinking about that kind of a relationship, what relationship should our institutions have to individuals was very, very important to me as a teenager and then sort of, I mean, through my entire life. Is it why you didn't join OpenAI in 2015? No. And do you regret that decision? Yeah, I suppose I did consider it going as they were getting started. It would have been an interesting life choice. I had a lot of doubts about the wisdom of pursuing artificial general intelligence, which would not at all resolve then, they were just fears. So that was part of the reason. Honestly, really the main reason at that point, it's this point about comparative advantage.

58:58It was like, oh, AI is happening. It's become very fashionable. You know, if you kind of wake up in the morning and it turns out that some institution is mad keen to pay you to do whatever it is you're doing You should actually think about whether you're in the right line of business I tend to think unfortunately for creative work There's an anti -correlation between how valuable what you're doing is and and what you're being paid often Well, it's kind of it's the the anti -economist point of view. It's not it's not right But like there's a simple model in which that is right actually a simple very much kind of an economist model So I have felt for more than a decade that AI was, you know, it becomes sort of around 2011, 2012 when I decided to write, to start writing my book about neural nets, it becomes sort of this unstoppable force in the world or very difficult to stop.

59:43It was clear it was going to attract more and more capital, more and more people. And so also to some extent I just felt like I should go and do something else if that's the case. In the next 20 years, what do you think your comparative advantage will be? I'll tell you after 20 years. But you face a year, something like now, right? The problem is step is before you. The problem is, of course, it's very helpful for motivational reasons to have answers to that, but your answers never turn out to you what the correct answer was. Probably my ability to write. And your Twitter biography says, I'm like, quote, searching for the new menace.

1:00:16What does that mean with respect to you? Just trying to find the deepest possible experiences in the world, in people and things and ideas and places. And final question, what do you think it is that you will learn about next? You love to ask this question? I've heard you ask it before. I will learn more, much more deeply about religion than I have in the past. And that involves travel, going to church, reading books, talking to people, all of those things. It involves all of those things. Yeah, I'm going to see the highest of here in Istanbul in the near future. That's gorgeous. I've wanted to see for almost all way adult life and I have never been.

1:00:55Have you been to Amrit's Orr? No. That to me is the most religious feeling sight I've ever visited. So I would recommend going there. And it's not a hard trip in any way at all. I've never been to India. You must go to Amrit's Orr. And the old cliche, something like when it comes to religion, every Indian's a millionaire, it's not really true. But I still think India is the best place to go to think about religion. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I'd love to go to Jerusalem as well. I think for somewhat similar reasons. But there you think about tension. The religious aspects of tension, but I think more about tension than about religion per say.

1:01:33Hmm. And it's very useful for that. Michael Nielsen, thank you very much. Thanks so much, Tyler. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm Attyler Cowan and the show is At Cowan Convose. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.