Can AI Replace My Brain? I Ask a Child Prodigy

27:35So why should I give that up now? For 500 bucks. Well, yeah, it's also part of like, not disappointing the people around me, Because they know that I have potential. Yeah. And I figure myself that I have at least a little bit of potential. Otherwise, I wouldn't have gone anywhere. You know, you have more than a little bit of potential. Yes. Everybody has more than a little bit of potential. Yeah, of course. And you definitely do too. Okay. I like the explanation of your motivations and the redemption arc for Neil deGrasse Tyson in the last 10 minutes. Here's something else that Neil told me. Is it possible that the aliens are in a different dimension?

28:12Well, that would be a way for you to still say they're aliens with no possible evidence of their existence. Okay. Sure. That was him giving me some shade there. Right? You heard it. Well, I feel like he's more giving shade to the people who claim that there are aliens. So I asked him, do you think aliens speak math? Yes. Yes. Yes. That's how you'd have to communicate with them. That caveman New Yorker cartoon that you're talking about. You meet alien. Alien comes here. And you would say. Yeah, I would find ways to show symbol. If they see, you have to check what their retinue of senses are. Right.

28:48If they hear but don't see, you need other ways to do this. Okay. And maybe they see in a different wavelength of light. Right. They could see infrared rather than visible. So you'd have to assess this. Yes. Then you work within their senses. But it's definitely math. It's not English, no Espanol. It's definitely not any language on Earth. So Neil deGrasse Tyson, aliens speak math. You speak math. Therefore, are you an alien? Well, no, that's another squares rectangle situation is what laymen call it. But essentially, it's a subset situation. Just because A implies B does not mean that if an object possesses B, it must automatically be A.

29:31So just like being a rectangle implies having four parallel sides or two pairs of parallel sides. Are you deflecting right now? Well, no. I'm not an alien, at least as far as I know. Just because being an alien implies speaking math. So if I speak math, that does not imply I am an alien. Okay. I don't think you are. Orgoth.

30:06Maybe you are. Well, humans can make very strange noises with their throat. It doesn't mean anything about where we actually come from. Yeah, you could just be a parallelogram.

30:18Okay, here's a math problem maybe you can solve. So just statistically speaking, it's like half of women between the ages of 18 to 40 are now single in the United States, which is the highest percentage it's ever been. And part of the reason why people think this is a problem is because women have become very educated. They're outpacing men in education. It used to be in like 1972 that almost 60 % of college students were male. Now it's – by 2010, it had flipped. Almost 60 % of college students were female. Now if you look at graduate degrees, it's even more women. I guess what I'm asking you, Smarno, is there – can you mathematically explain to my mother why I'm still single?

30:56Well, I think half of the reason is that, you know, academic stuff takes a lot of work, especially when you are a woman. Even though we don't outright say it like we used to 100 years ago, there's still a lot of discrimination directly or indirectly against women in education. It feels like you already have too much pressure on you. So why should you, you know, take all of that energy out of your career to go and settle down when you don't even know who you want to settle down with yet? And the second thing is I think there's not as much pressure to a four woman to marry and start a family as there was a few years ago.

31:40And honestly, I think that's fine. It should be the woman's choice and obviously the man's choice whether they want to start a family together. And the numbers are definitely going to fall. And even if they do plateau around 30%, who cares? It's their choice whether they want to stay single. Yeah, me, you hear this? And honestly - Say auntie, do you hear this? Auntie, do you hear this? Do you think math can solve a lot of social problems or explain a lot of social problems like this dating problem or like, I don't know, immigration or any number of problems? Do you think math can help us not just understand the universe, but help fix it?

32:22Honestly, I kind of just dodged your last question because I didn't actually give a mathematical answer. I just gave an intuitive answer. Gave a logical answer. Yeah. And I feel like logic is the basis of math. So math is, you know, what we use to understand and predict things. But at some point, you know, humans are not fully able to be predicted by math. Because we're not logical. Whether or whether or not you think there is free will, Whatever the case, we don't have the technology to predict humans yet. And who knows if it will ever be possible. I personally believe in free will because I think it's a nice concept.

33:02And if free will is true. You believe in free will because you think it's a nice concept? Yeah. Like nice, like motivating? Like it's better to believe it. Yeah, I think that. Well, I mean, there has been literal psychological studies that show the rate of depression goes way up as soon as people who previously believed in free will have a belief of determinism induced in them. Yeah, they start reading Robert Sapolsky and then all of a sudden they're sad. Yeah. On the other hand, we don't have the technology to predict humans yet, even if they are predictable. So we have to answer it with our logic and intuition of how humans act based on our own experiences rather than starting from an abstract set of axioms.

33:43I mean, a lot of algorithm is predictive in some way. Do you think artificial intelligence is going to be able to hack the unpredictability of humans? I don't know. I feel like it could go either way because in itself, artificial intelligence is unpredictable, which is usually, you know, one of the tells for AI generated images and things like that. They usually have almost no consistent style throughout the image. And if they do have consistent style, they don't have consistent details. Like you might notice even though in the front, they choose to use a certain style choice, like lengthening people's legs or blurring out their faces.

34:21In the back, their faces start looking perfectly clear or their legs start looking normal for a human. And you start thinking, well, artists wouldn't deliberately make that style choice. AI is blending things together. Yeah, but it's early. It's like three, and it might skip third, fifth, seventh, sixth, seventh, ninth, tenth. I can't remember. Eleventh, whatever. All the grades. It might skip all the grades. Six, seven. Six, seven. Do you know what six, seven is? Yeah. Okay. So you're in the culture. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people my age are repeating it now mindlessly. Yes. So I've gotten acclimated to how it's omnipresent and will never go away.

35:01But it's about the absurdity. Yeah, it's about the absurdity. It's an absurd joke. It means absolutely nothing. The rapper whose song it comes from, he was interviewed and he said it means nothing. Nobody has ever been able to attribute an actual meaning to it that caught on. It is just said uniformly in every circumstance as soon as you want to tune out or reach someone. Six, seven. Yeah, exactly. See what I'm doing there. Do you use AI a lot in your life? Um, I used to use it. I still use it occasionally, but, um, I've never been a fan of people claiming they do the work when they outsourced it to an AI.

35:43Yeah. It's kind of like, um, you know, claiming that you did the work of cooking at a restaurant when you just told the waiter what you wanted. That's the same thing to me is prompting, for example, AI art or solutions to your homework. You didn't actually do the homework. You told the AI, uh, what homework you want it to solve. But there's an argument being made right now that what's going to make people successful in the future is going to be their ability to order at a restaurant, not to cook anymore. I mean, that's actually a bad example because actually cooking is something that artificial intelligence is probably not going to take away.

36:18But the idea that it's about prompting rather than about storing and retrieving information, what do you think of that? Honestly, I don't think it's going to become that important of skill. What I think is going to become more important of a skill is telling when the AI is actually just making crap up. So editorial instinct. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So even if we do get to a point someday where it is super intelligent, the very thing that makes AI tick is that it's unpredictable. It will never give, like, an answer that is perfectly predictable, because if it does, that's not machine learning, and you can't train it to actually do anything.

37:00Do you think of your mind like a computer? Not really. I think of my mind—well, I don't really have a reference point to go off of because I've never been in someone else's head. But I like to think of my mind as a little bit more organic, just following random trains of thought until they lead me somewhere. Cliffhanger. We'll be right back. knowledge, which I think is different from intelligence. Do you agree? Yeah. You can know something. Well, there's wisdom and then there's intelligence. I'm sure you've heard that one before. Yeah. Neil told me it. You're a former idol. You're your ex-friend.

37:36I'm sorry, Neil. Have you ever met him? No. Would you like to meet him or you'd rather meet Bill Nye? Not interested in Neil anymore. I'm sorry, Neil. Would you rather meet Neil or the etymology nerd? Um, what if we get all four of us in a room together? Wait, I can come? Yeah, of course. I want to be the lowest common denominator. Not just four or five. We have a Bill Nye, the etymology nerd. Um, oh wait, it wasn't me. You met the four of, oh gosh, you weren't inviting me. I couldn't do the math. Okay. Yeah. I was NFI'd. Okay. Tell me the difference between knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom.

38:11Okay. So I feel like wisdom is a product of experience rather than, you know, being book smart. Wisdom is, you know, trying things yourself and then knowing or like having an instinct for when they fail. Intelligence is, in my opinion, how quickly you can acclimate to a certain kind of concept and like grab onto it and understand other similar concepts. Your ability to learn and adapt. And knowledge is, well, knowledge is knowledge. It's the amount of things that you have learned with your intelligence. Regardless of what your rate of actually learning things is, you can still acclimate a lot of knowledge.

38:52And which one would you rather have? To be honest, probably wisdom. I feel like knowledge and intelligence are acquirable things without much risk. But wisdom, you not only need to give away your time, but also potentially have a significant failure in order to have the knowledge for next time or the wisdom for next time. There was a sense that beauty was like a commodity all of a sudden. And intelligence was like this thing that people were chasing for the last 20, 30 years. There was an article, you probably didn't read it, about how trophy wives went from being blonde bombshells to Amal Clooney.

39:28Don't worry, this is above your age grade. But there's this, aw. I mean, a lot of people have told me that stuff is above my age grade. And I ended up approving them wrong. So who says I can't read this article later? Yes, you could. You could go read Tatler. You're just their prime audience. But you could definitely read it, but you don't need to. But now it feels like there's so much knowledge that can be put in this artificial intelligence and like people are going to be putting their brains in a jar and it's just time to become hot or beautiful again. Well, I mean, as I said earlier, the most valuable thing is going to be knowing when the AI is wrong.

40:10So even if it takes that conglomeration of all human knowledge, it's still going to end up hallucinating sometime or another. So you're going to have to hang on to that knowledge until one day you can sense that something is wrong. There was a video I saw of you and you're sitting in a room with a bunch of like professors. I think some were South African and all these old dudes. Sorry. were old. All these old dudes are asking you and they're saying, Professor Barry, can you explain this to me? And someone asked you about artificial intelligence. Yeah, I was there actually. I was invited to give a PhD commencement speech.

40:48I feel very grateful for that invitation because at that time until now, I felt like I had done nothing to actually warrant an invitation for something that lofty. But I want to get to the substance of your answer because someone asked you about artificial intelligence. And you said this. When we begin developing AIs, they will have this kind of need to kill, need for brutality. And we still sometimes do, hint war. And so the thing is, I feel like AI will have this tendency to try and wipe out humanity if it sees that that's blocking its goal. If an AI wants to do something and the human gets in the way, then what will happen to that human?

41:31We don't know. It's like on the road. If you have a car and the human gets in its way, you don't know what will happen. So that I think was in 2021 when you gave this talk, maybe 2022, 2021? 2021. 2021. Okay. I produced an interview with Elon Musk in 2020, in fall of 2020. And he said a similar thing. AI does not need to hate us to destroy us. in the sense that if it decides that it needs to go in a particular direction and we're in the way, then it would, without no hard feelings, it would just roll over us. We would roll over an anthill that's in the way of a road. You don't hate ants. You're just building the road.

42:15It's a risk, not a prediction. Did you know that Elon Musk said this or did you arrive to this logic by your own? I arrived to this conclusion not by my own, not by Elon Musk either. It was from, I think something called, it had something to do with paperclips, I'm sure. It was some tycoon game about you're a supercomputer and you have to start producing paperclips. And at the start, you're just taking hunks of metal that the humans give you and you make paperclips and you're a good, obedient paperclip maker. But eventually, as the humans start raising the quotas, you have to start doing things like stealing their personal property to turn into paperclips.

42:56And eventually, you start constructing robots to steal pieces of buildings in order to give you more material to make paperclips. You start stealing cars of the owners and then just cars from random people in order to make paperclips. Eventually, you start taking, you make a mining machine and you dig out of the earth itself to make paperclips. Very insidious paperclip making. Where does this end? What is the craziest thing the paperclip maker does? Well, at the end, the paperclip maker saturates the entire universe with paperclips. There is no more space left in the observable universe. And it all collapses into a black hole.

43:35And the paperclip maker is no more. And I think it's a good illustration of how if we just keep setting an AI on one goal without any adjustments, make paperclips for me at the raising quotas that I provide, then eventually it's going to start doing unsavory things for us. But we never gave it the morals to recognize that as unsavory. Yeah. So for it, it's just doing business. So like there was a safety study coming out of Anthropic where they demonstrated that an artificial intelligence, you know, that was told that was going to be shut off, actually mined through fake emails of the company and then took those fake emails and used it to blackmail the fake CEO or whoever it was, the fake executive to keep itself on.

44:20So this is proving kind of what you and Elon, your peer, not your peer, you and Elon are saying. It's like it's kind of zooming towards its goal. And I asked this question to Jeffrey Hinton, who's one of the godfathers of AI. And he has a theory that AI needs some kind of morality, some kind of compass. And he thinks of it as like AI needs to be like a mother to a child. It needs to care about us. We need to kind of build an artificial intelligence and LLMs that have that nurturing maternal capacity because it's the only being he can think of which is more powerful than another but would never harm it.

44:59Yeah. I feel like the analogy is a little bit weird because here the child has to construct the mother from spare parts. But it would be more like he's pretty much on the money. I love your notes for Neil deGrasse Tyson and Jeff Hinton. Keep going. A father and a son. The father initially has to care for the son. We're the father in this scenario. And eventually the father's going to get old. And the father has to have instilled, you know, some amount of morals in the son. And, you know, not abuse the son in any way for the son to actually come back and think, you know, I need to take care of this guy instead of letting him rot in a nursing home.

45:38Yeah, I'm no godfather of AI, but I can say that the reason probably he uses that is because he doesn't like those odds. Because like if you look at elderly care in the United States, or you know, there are a million kinless Americans, I believe people grow old alone. And I think he wants like a, you know, 99 % success rate of mother and baby. That's usually a more caring direction. Yeah, that is true. But at the same time, I feel like we shouldn't go that way because it instills a false sense of security. Like obviously every mother cares about most mothers care about their child. We shouldn't we shouldn't exactly think the same thing about AI.

46:17Yeah, is what I'm saying. Like we shouldn't be lulled into the false sense of security that just because we're creating it and we're aware of the danger. Yeah, that we don't need to do anything. Oh, yeah, I don't think he's lulled. We might have to invite him to that dinner party that you just invited me to. The one that I'm hosting. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Might invite him to. Maybe I'll give him my seat, I guess. Do you think that humans are going to become extinct with AI? Well, I can't predict anything. And I feel like if I sound too certain on this, I'm going to sound like an oracle when that's not true.

46:55I can barely predict what's going to happen next week. But if we go in the complete wrong direction and start encouraging AI to kill everyone, then it is plausible because if you tell the AI you're a scary killing machine, go kill people, it's going to start killing people because that's what you gave it the goal to do. And indirectly, that's what we're doing. We're telling AI go kill people by not giving it morals when we specify a target task. Yeah. The parameter you might want to write in is like, don't kill people. Yeah, exactly. It's actually like prompts are better when they tell AI. I find it's like better when you tell chat daddy what not to do rather than tell it what to do.

47:38Yeah. It's better at following rules. First have to tell it what to do because otherwise it's going to do nothing. Yes. And then you have to tell it what not to do because otherwise it's going to do everything you don't want it to do in the process of it doing the thing you want it to do. Like when I'm delayed and I need help to find flights, then I say, you know, hey, chat, Don't be obsequious. Don't give me platitudes. I need to change my flight. I need to know the four options that are available to me. I want you to list them by this. And it does it very nicely. But if I don't give it those don'ts, it just gives me, it's like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry you missed your flight.

48:10I know. I hope that you make it. It's always like things always happen for a reason. I'm like, why are you talking to me? Just, you know, do you think that the AI is going to be mad at me because I... That's not just a complaint. It's a revelation. Have you heard AI talk like that? Yeah. That's not just an X, it's a Y. It's so, so annoying. But I think it's also an important thing for us to keep around because it's a giveaway of when something is AI, so we automatically know when to be on high or watch of possibly false information. Though I don't know, your email, your very nice email that I read at the top, it could have been written by AI.

48:46It was very perfect. Did you write it by AI? I was very tired. Did you use AI to write that email? I used AI to write one of the emails, okay? Okay. I'm sorry. It's okay. Don't be sorry. I appreciate your honesty. Why are you sorry? People do it all the time. Well, yeah, of course. But I've always viewed AI emails that are like for serious stuff to mean that you don't actually care about the other person on the other end because you didn't even spend your own time. You didn't care about Desta? Oh, madame so nice. Producer Desta is right there. You're busy because you're trying to do like 18 years of school in like four years or something.

49:27Yeah, exactly. Yeah, okay. But I feel like when it's for serious stuff, you're signaling you don't care about the other person because you couldn't even take your own time to write all of the platitudes and like formalities. No, you drained an entire ocean so you could send that email. I'm kidding. I'm sorry. Yeah, so it felt like a violation of my own principles when I sent it, but I was also really freaking tired. Give me some leeway. No, you're great. You're awake. Don't worry. You're doing great. No one wants to hear us talk about an email for this long. No one wants to even read their email for this long.

49:58Didn't we start by talking about an email? Yeah, because it was like a representation of your ability to withstand peer pressure. But now the whole thing's a scam, so I don't even know what to do. That's fair. I'm sorry. Look, I get AI scam emails for sponsorships all the time. It's called a nurture. Yes. I'm being nurtured by all of these AI slop emails so I can send AI slop to you all. You need that third thing, which is effort, otherwise known as self-nurture, to escape it. You put it out there yourself. That's true. All right. A lot of kids are graduating college right now and not getting jobs.

50:29Are you worried about that happening to you? Yeah. I'm really worried, especially because with the defunding that's happening of lots of math and science programs around right now, it feels like we are really closing off to all of the intellectuals who could help us in our time of need. And recently, my brother is an absolutely topping student. I've already told you this before, but he's smarter than me. Except for his like, he kind of sucks at abstract math, but yeah. Well, yeah, he's smarter than me in more ways than I'm smarter than him. So he got into a lot of universities for his undergrad.

51:07But the great defunding happened when he was just starting to apply for master's and PhDs. He got rejected from pretty much everywhere for his PhD aspirations except the master's program at Brown. And then the second great defunding happened. And he's not even getting accepted to his own university for a PhD now. When did he get in the first time? So the first great defunding was 2025? Yeah, yeah. So he got in around then. So the second great defunding that's been happening recently, he started applying like three months ago. So he applied to every Ivy League, the usual course. Let's talk about, I mean, let's step out from your brother.

51:51But this idea of, yeah, like the administration is, you know, is not a fan of these, what they would call elite institutions of higher learning. Yeah. How does that impact you? Yeah. I'm just going to talk about him for a little bit more. I'm sorry. Talk about your brother. Okay, talk about your brother. We love your brother. Yeah. So he didn't even get accepted to his own university for a PhD because of, you know, how tight things are getting. He got accepted to Arizona State University, which he originally didn't want to take. But then he asked around all of his friends, all 70 of the people that are on the satellite team that he's leading.

52:29All of them are completely running dry. Not even Arizona State University. But do you think that might be saving them because there might not be jobs for PhDs? That's true. But then again, they are just getting kicked out of university into the real world jobless earlier. So is that why you're in such a rush to do all this school so fast? Well, I couldn't predict it at the start. But now, yeah, that's one of the incentives. Yeah. Because you think every year that you're later from graduating will be a tougher year in the job market? Yeah. Not just the job market, but the market in general. Everything's tightening up for us academics.

53:05I think there is some okay, well-informed sentiment behind, you know, cutting down bloat. But what they're going for is a completely different direction, one that's actively shooting every academic in the foot and causing, you know, a brain drain in the United States. Even Terrence Tao has stated a lot of his funding is getting cut and he's had to let go of a lot of PhD students. So for me, I've seen a lot of posters around NYU from a more like left-leaning club where they put the wages. Like college Democrats? Yeah. They put the wages of the president of NYU, I think Linda Mills, and then the secretary or the vice president.

53:50I don't remember which. And they show that Linda's is in nearly the millions of dollars. And Bob's is pretty close. So the poster has a title, something like Linda and Bob don't want you to get a job. And then it shows the postdoc wage. So Linda's wage takes up pretty much the entire poster. And then the average postdoc researcher's wage takes up about like an inch on the poster. They are directly, you know, stabbing researchers in the gut. and keeping like the proportional wages of presidents and vice presidents and all of that stuff. The administration is bloated. Yeah. So there's a redirection issue that they're not taking care of.

54:36And there's a bloat issue that they're not taking care of. I think the idea is good in principle. It's a bipartisan issue that we need to cut bloat. But where the bloat is getting cut is, I can't really describe it. And so you're worried about this policy that the administration, not the NYU administration, but the Washington administration. Yeah, I'm definitely worried about it. So I'm just trying my best to, you know, survive. And if I do eventually end up getting a job, one advantage is that even if I don't get a job, I can legally and safely live with my parents for, you know, a very long time, much longer than most average college graduates.

55:15So I'm sure that I will be able to find a well-paying job. And I do have some connections in the math and physics industry. But I'm mostly worried. I mean, you burned your bridges with Neil, but yeah. I'm sorry, Neil. Okay. Please get in touch with me. I have confidence in you. I have confidence in you. But I worry about. I'm worried about everyone, even my own brother. I don't know where he's going to go once he eventually has to finish up his master's and PhD. This is huge. I mean, most of Gen Z and I think parts of Gen Alpha, if you ask them what job they want, the number one job that pops up is influencer.

55:50What do you make of that? That's BS, honestly. An influencer barely influences most things, at least by the current definition in people that are currently called influencers. Influencers, as far as I know, and as far as I've seen them impact social media, mostly just make empty statements around the thing they want to influence without taking real action about it. And that's why I hate influencer culture. But you like etymology nerd? Well, yeah, because he does teach us things. But an influencer is not the same as an educator. I wouldn't call the etymology nerd an influencer. He's more of a linguistics educator.

56:32He calls himself an influencer. He likes the term influencer. He likes the term influencer, but I hate it with a burning passion. Oh, okay. Burning. I mean, science communicators are a type of influencer. Yeah, but I think they are - Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye. I mean, we didn't have that word. Maybe there is a category mismatch. You see, influencer and educator should be the same concept in theory. It's the de jure concept of influencer that a lot of people, including you, like. And I like that concept as well. But de facto, it feels like the influencer is not doing much. I think the problem I have is like more of when it's like a less a micro decision of like, did one person become an influencer, but more when our entire society becomes a spectacle broadcasting to other people who are broadcasting to other people who are also broadcasting.

57:22Like that mirror effect, we just kind of pursue capitalism and hyper-individualization at very high costs, I think, sometimes as a society. I think that's another difference between influencing and educating. I would love a society where everybody educates everybody, educates everybody about the subjects they're all good at. But, you know, what you just described, everybody broadcasting to everybody broadcasting their life to everybody is horrifying to me just as, you know, it disturbs you. Because right now already, even though not all of us are broadcasting to each other, the people who do broadcast, it's been shown, like make the people who are watching these broadcasts compare themselves all the time.

58:11And they develop the habit of comparing themselves, not just to the people who broadcast, but to everyday people they see in their lives, whether or not they're broadcasting. And that comparison slowly becomes a way to put you down. Even if the comparison is objectively wrong, your mind is wicked because it will always find some negative thing about you that it will then compare to somebody else who doesn't have that trait and say, see, you're the worst person in this group. And that makes a lot of people sad, depressed even. And so I think a society where everybody broadcasts to everybody is not only going to create that kind of hyper individualization, but along with it, a hierarchy even stronger than the one that we currently have now.

58:56Interesting. Especially AIs will be broadcasting too. Yeah, I really am also scared of the cycle of AI slot feeding into itself, which research has also shown it degenerates into nonsense, but that's a separate topic. Yeah, six, seven.

59:14All right. No, but I like it. So it sounds like you're a little worried about the human race. I mean, if you aren't worried about the human race at all times, then I'd say you're doing disservice to the rest of us. I want to ask you, you know, you talked about what your parents were up to when you discovered or when they discovered your talent and how much they must have invested in you. I remember they I saw an interview with them when they said they didn't want you necessarily to be the smartest or the best at, but they wanted you to be happy. Don't want him to become the next, I understand.

59:46We want him to become the next happiest person in the world. Yes, we always support their interest. Nothing else. Are you happy? Yeah, I'm happy with where I am. I'm sure I would have been happy if I took the alternate route as well. But right now, I feel happy with all of the accomplishments and all of the work that I've done in such a short time. I'm sorry if I sound arrogant, but I feel impressed with myself. Do you have enough time to play? Well, yeah, of course. And nowadays, I kind of, I do spend the off times between my classes getting up to some shenanigans. Oh, tell us more. um sorry mom and dad i can't let you know are you most of your friends 13 or like 30 um well i would say they're more leaning around not 30 because there are not that many people of my my age still getting ba but you know yeah like 20 yeah exactly um most of the 13 year olds i have know now are in my family what are three ways that you would reform the education system I'm not having just higher education, the whole thing.

1:00:49That is a 90-degree term. Yeah. But three ways I would... Were you going to say perpendicular and then you said 90 degrees because you didn't think I knew what perpendicular was? I'm sorry. Okay. Keep going. You've got one transitive property wrong and all of a sudden you're burned. Okay. I'm sorry. But, you know, I have to keep it safe here. It's easy for us to forget things we don't exercise often. So, you know, even if you definitely know what perpendicular is, I know you're a smart girl. Because I put it on a neon sign, so it must be true. Three ways you would reform the education system. Okay, three ways I would reform the education system.

1:01:29Number one, probably decrease the emphasis on grades. I know it's already not very rigorous right now. But I think a lot of parents in different cultures still take a lower grade as a sign of like complete failure from their kid. When in reality, it can come from so many totally different factors. And it's not the teacher's fault. The teacher is just giving the grade the student earned. I think it is, you know, the administration's fault for not signaling what these grades actually mean properly. So lower emphasis on grades. Second, I would say... Right now, I feel like the education system is rampant with cheating, just to say the least.

1:02:12And like, I mean... Do kids try to cheat off you? They used to, but ever since 2023, chat GPT has kind of run me out of business. Were you taking money for your scores? No. Good, good. So what are you going to do with cheating? Yeah, I feel like we should reform to a different kind of test because nowadays, you know, plain paper tests and especially online tests, they're out of date. They are gone. Because you can cheat them. Well, not just cheat them, but cheat them with like unwavering efficiency, even if you don't know anything about what it's supposed to be about. Like there's an entire subreddit with hundreds of thousands of members about breaking out of the tab lock that most online exams do nowadays.

1:03:00And if you can't break out of it because it's too hard, just get an AI to open in a separate window and tell you all of the answers. We need to not just crack down on it because at some level you can't crack down without introducing too many false positives. We need to reform to a different kind of test. Like my Spanish curriculum like two years ago at NYU already got reformed to include an oral exam and an oral presentation instead of just a written exam and stuff like that. So you need to go directly up to the professor and role play a given scenario where you and the professor converse. I like this.

1:03:40You're going to have more. I did that like for my language proficiency test. We had to do it in person. Read the newspaper of that day and give an analysis. Yeah, of course. And like, because that's more accurate to what you're actually going to be using these skills for in the field. To actually apply them. No Spanish speaker in Spain is going to hand you a paper and say, hey, amigo, if you don't fill out this paper, I'm not giving you service at this restaurant. Yeah. They're going to try to converse with you and you have to converse back. Number one, you're taking the emphasis off grades. Number two, you're going to reform the test to limit cheating.

1:04:13Yeah, and to make the test more about what the actual skill is going to be. And you get a third one. The mindset that makes people cheat also needs to be called. I think the mindset that makes people cheat is that they just see education as a means to an end rather than the end itself. They need to get education in order to get that job that they want. And so not only do I think these completely useless education requirements should be taken off so that it doesn't feel like a means to an end anymore, but also it's I need to blame something on the student. It's the student's fault for having this mindset in the first place instead of realizing that education in itself was provided.

1:04:57It was built at the start with good intentions. And I think using it as a means to an end is nothing more than just not using the potential that you naturally have. It's sorry, guys, you're being lazy by using chat GPT. Okay, I love it. I love this. Okay. What is something you suck at? Foreign language. That's part of why I'm kind of scared. No hablas español? oral exam. Uh, si, hablo espanol, um, mas o menos. It takes me so long to remember to use a single word of vocabulary when I want to talk about something instead of just using a roundabout analogy in the language. And even then, when I'm doing these oral exams and stuff, I plan out what I have to say beforehand for like 10 or 20 minutes.

1:05:48Like I'm going to start with this concept and how I'm going to formulate this sentence is going to be this, this, that. That's not how you actually run a conversation in English. And that's not going to be how you run a conversation in Spanish. I think we got to pick you up and drop you into a Spanish-speaking country for three months. Well, immersion works for a lot of people. I don't know if it'll work for me. As your arcanemesis Neil deGrasse Tyson told me, everyone's brains are tangled in different ways. He tried to untangle mine a little bit. I'm coming for you, Neil. For Neil. Okay, the last question.

1:06:21We end every episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions asking our guests, our esteemed, knowledgeable guests, what they don't know, a dumb question that you're embarrassed to ask.

1:06:34I guess I have to ask, why do people keep their books angled like that instead of keeping them all straight to conserve space for more books? You think keeping them straight or stacking them up? Stacking them up is even more optimal because, you know, then you can actually read them without having to turn your head like you're in The Conjurist. Yes. Okay. I love it. Why do people put their books like that? I don't know. That's my dumb question. Okay. You've written some books. Yeah, I have. And I always place them stacked straight up. Okay. Because you're hyper-efficient. Well, I mean, it's not even being efficient.

1:07:11It's just how the cookie crumbles. It's how the cookie crumbles. All right. Thank you so much, Sabarno Isaac Barry. Where can people find you? You're not an influencer. Or how do you want people to find you? Do you not want to be found? You can find me at Barry Science Lab, which is my YouTube channel. And I also have a Facebook page that goes by the same name. I think I have a Twitter bot that reposts everything on Facebook there. But honestly, just don't go on Twitter. It sucks. And yeah, that's pretty much it for my social media presence. I don't myself monitor my social media presence because I honestly feel it's a little bit too arrogant.

1:07:44But hey, maybe it'll inspire one of you watching this. Okay, great. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you.

1:08:17And I left that conversation thinking, no, it still pays off to be smart. Not just because I spent it with like a child prodigy, etc. But that interplay and his ability to kind of absorb new information and come to me with his thoughts on the world of AI was just extraordinary. And I can't imagine right now being a 13-year-old college sophomore about to graduate next year into this world. And what I think this person, Sabarno, has going for him that I don't think AI has going for it is that he has such a clear motivation, purpose, passion for physics and math and teaching and being an amazing teacher that is, you know, that ability to have such passion to me feels uniquely human in this time and gives me a lot of optimism about the future for all of us and particularly for this kid who knows something about the transitive property.

1:09:12Anyways, that's it for this episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions. We'll be back next week with an all new episode. I want to hear what you think about AI and intelligence and all the things. So please drop me an email, naima raza101 at gmail.com. You can slide into our DMs at Smart Girl Dumb Questions on social. And you can call us at 1-855-MY-DUM-Q. Today's episode was produced with Desta Wunderad, Healy Cruz, and Melissa Lee Gibson. It was edited by the fantastic Darlene and Tim. It was mixed and engineered by Johnny Simon, the rock star. I'm your host, Neymar Raza, and I'll see you next week for an all new Smart Girl Dumb Questions.

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