Can Humans Stay Smart in the Age of AI? (David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute)

35:04Well, that we don't look at. So that's part of our argument was how should we in a principled way think about what should you be looking for such that you are entitled to say that that property is surprising or emergent, right? And the paper sort of goes into different ways to do that. So I think that's one thing. And the other point, of course, is that the whole point of the epistemological approach to emergence is coming up with parsimonious theories. So if you look at LLMs, what is the parsimonious theory of a trillion parameter model? There isn't one. It's a trillion parameters. Yes. Yes. And whereas my theory of you would be passing me as I say, you know, tell me a bit about your family.

35:53Tell me a bit about your interest. Tell me a bit about where you went to school. Tell me a bit. In other words, it's all very high level, right? Yes. It's very psychological. It's all sort of folk psychological. And it would give me a deeper, not a perfect, but a deeper understanding of you. I would not really get much of an understanding of you if I put you in an fMRI experiment. Yes. And so the deepest point here is that the LLM community is not committed yet to a theory of LLM psychology or LLM cognitive science. At that point, they're going to have to reckon with neuro to cognitive to psychological, which they're not.

36:35And that can be turned into a kind of complexity speed. Fascinating. You've spoken elsewhere, or perhaps you've written about it. I can't remember where I found it. But the sort of three qualities of intelligence being inference, representation and strategy. Do you see sort of any of those embodied in an LLM at this point? And more broadly, what are your questions about whether this is really intelligent or just strictly knowledgeable? Yeah, right. So I should explain why. There's a huge literature, it's 100 years old, if not more, on what intelligence is. And the problem with 99 % of it is it's entirely human.

37:23and if you're an evolutionary person like I am then you have to worry about where that came from it's not then a miracle happened right there are people who believe that which is fine it's just not not my particular church and so the so then I wondered what would be a general framing of the concept that would allow for the possibility of talking about intelligence in viruses or intelligence in bats and intelligence in humans and intelligence is in companies. Hence this three-dimensional approach, which is, if you like, one way to say this is any intelligent system has to perform calculations on representations of the problem to achieve a strategic objective.

38:13And it turns out that we have different kinds of theories for all three. The strategic bit is all about game theory. That's what game theory is for. It's about strategy. It doesn't worry too much about it. It does now in algorithmic game theory, but that's quite new. Certainly not in the world of von Neumann and in Nash. So strategy is about what it's for. What's the utility? What's the benefit? And inference is what LLMs do well. They do calculations well. That's what they were built for by McCullough and Pitts in 1943. they basically perform logical operations on quasi binary valued units. And what they're also not good at is representation.

38:57And that's the bit, by the way, that we would require for emergence to look at the internal wiring, so to speak, to see what they're actually, how they're encoding reality. And that's something that artists do beautifully. so you know art or the novel is not particularly powerful inferentially doesn't look like quantum mechanics but it's representationally extraordinarily deep it's not particularly strategic either i mean it doesn't really have an obvious utility so i think what i wanted to do is have a space that was very capacious in which you could put all things that have elements of all three, but to different degrees.

39:38And so I think that you can see what's happening with LLMs now. The current obsession with LLMs, as you know, is agentic. Agentic is just code for strategy. They're just saying, we need to have a strategic game theoretic dimension to what an LLM is, but the representational one has been somewhat neglected, except in the trivial sense of this thing can make kitschy artworks. But that will get better. But even when it is making kitschy artwork, let's say, it doesn't seem to me that it is actually doing sort of representational work in the way that you're really referring to it. Is that a fair appraisal?

40:19I think that it's absolutely right. I think that, which requires for me again, looking inside to see what is the elementary principle of representation? What are the atoms? How are you composing things? And I think if you think about music, when we learn music theory, we learn notes, which are representations of tones. Then we learn phrase structure, right? Then we learn forms, the sonata form, the symphonic form, what have you. these are representations they're clearly not strategic in a utilitarian sense they're kind of weird i mean what is the album kind of blue strategically trying to do other than delight you right you know so it we need a space to allow for the possibility of forms of experience which are not about utility which is a big part of intelligence this episode is brought to you by Persona, the B2B identity platform helping businesses verify users, fight fraud, and build trust.

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42:04It's fully configurable, so you can launch in days, not quarters. Want to see for yourself? Generalist listeners get a free year of the starter plan. Head to withpersona.com slash generalist and check it out. This makes me think of a book I think you must have written about at some point, which is The Glass Bead Game, because it strikes me that actually what Herman Hesse does in that book then is turning representational into strategy in that there are sort of warring or dueling compositions of music and literature and art. Does that sort of sound roughly right to you? Am I understanding some of what you're saying there?

42:45No, it is absolutely right. And I think that, for me, a very important book because the whole world that Herman Hesse evokes in the Glass-B game is kind of the Santa Fe Institute. And the game they're playing, the Glass-B game, is a little bit, as far as I'm concerned, a precursor to complexity science. I believe that quite strongly. In fact, John Holland, who invented genetic algorithms, that was his favorite novel for a reason. And interestingly, Murray Gell-Mann's favorite novel was Frankenstein. Oh, wow. No way. Wow. Yeah, that's very interesting too. So yes, I think you're correct. I think in the end, all three come together, right?

43:27Yes, exactly. In different orders. In the Glass B game, it was different. It started with the aesthetic impulse, and then it moved into the strategic. I think we're living in a world now which is a little bit too led by the strategic inferential. And I think it's going to be felt. I think we're already feeling it because there's a certain sterility to my experience with AIs. And I think it's the want of a better word. It doesn't have the art in it. Definitely. I mean, that's definitely true. It makes me wonder how you would view reinforcement learning through this lens, because in some respect, it seems like that maybe has more of that strategy piece, certainly.

44:12But I don't know, maybe that's too simplistic. Maybe it's playing strategy in the same way that generated art is playing representation, so to speak. yeah the the thing about agentic matter is it has intentions it has purpose it has function it has desire if you like in the book and there's you don't require that for rl right all you're saying is here's an input here's an output that's not the output i want don't do that again try that right in other words some form of pavlovian conditioning or what have you and i think that that's very simple and it works for pigeons and it works for ants and i think but what happens i think as a system becomes more truly strategic and representational is that this forward-looking intentional dimension starts to expand and um i mean i think that is that if you like in the space of this three-dimensional space, the human prognostication, the human planning, the human counterfactual future is our special characteristic.

45:27And so I'm not sure RL, I think it's kind of agnostic. I think it's a slightly orthogonal dimension, I think, to that discussion. Very interesting. You've spoken before about your sort of concern which I think is very well founded, that LLMs act as sort of such a tempting mental prosthetic for people that, you know, if we're not careful, and perhaps even if we are careful, we kind of can't help but allow it to atrophy our own cognition. What is the state of your concern about that these days? And do you think there's a way that we sort of manage to navigate a path where that doesn't happen in a profound sense.

46:10I think it's really much more dangerous than people realize. You know, I've been listening to people at Jeff Hinton talk about the existential threat of AI. I think this is the greater threat because we have, you see, with his concerns, which are very real, we don't have good precedent. But my concerns, we have great precedent. And you just have to look at the opioid crisis or the sugar crisis, processed food, whatever, the obesity crisis. These are all essentially about easy access to either long term non-nutritive sources, right, of foods of some kind or another or materials that are addictive.

47:02and I'm concerned that LLMs in their current incarnation are like sugar cocaine. It's a really low quality diet of pre-processed factual knowledge that flatters you into addiction and the consequences are not insignificant. I mean, people have talked a lot about what social media has done to the world and there are good things it's done too i don't deny it but there are some dreadful things it's done and i think they and the dreadful things it's done relate to this problem i think of low quality addictive substances and so in an attempt to formalize that i've been trying to develop a theory of intelligent artifacts when they work for you they make you smarter and when they don't and i'm happy to talk about it but briefly speaking um i basically divide them into what I call competitive cognitive artifacts.

48:04And these are things like the GPS in your car that will not make you a better navigator without it. In fact, you're going to become a worse navigator because you have no idea what space even means when you've become a car student. And so as opposed to complementary artifacts like a map, where if you have the map in your mind, You don't need the map to be physically present to navigate through the world. And I think we can start thinking about all of technology, which is what I've been doing, and developing a kind of a mathematical theory for this, which shows when you plus a technology works, you plus a technology for a while, minus it technology works.

48:49Yes. In other words, like the map case. And I think we have to think very carefully about this because the consequence of the human desire to minimize its energy expenditure, our natural tendency towards slothfulness, our natural tendency to have excessive belief in authority. And here I am waffling on. Don't believe me. I think, you know, I think I think those those two predilections in combination with this technology are deeply troubling to me. And I think it won't be long, right, before you outsource all of your judgment. I mean, you know, what should I eat today? Who should I talk to today?

49:30Who should I vote for? I mean, at that point, what are we? Yes. Not only who should I talk to, but what should I say to them? They've just responded. What should I say back? I think, I mean, that I already see to sort of a startling extent that you can see it on social media, certainly, but you can see just in people's correspondences with one another, you're like, ah, what's actually happening here functionally is your AI is talking to this person's AI. And the human is actually more or less just a delivery mechanism at this point. It's a kind of enslavement. And I think we should understand this.

50:15And again, we do understand this at some level we know, right? Because everyone is making this judgment call, which is, I know that this company just wants to profit from me. I mean, that's just a fact. Yes. There's nothing wrong with that. That's great. You know, that will hopefully be a source of innovation. At the same time, you need to develop resistance. But it's so hard to do that. I wonder, you know, if that expects too much. I don't think it does. I don't think it does. I feel as if, you know, it's interesting. Here's why I'm optimistic about that. It's a battle. It's a battle between our addictions and our greed against our desire to be stimulated.

50:59Right? Human beings, it's very interesting. You know, at a certain point in your life, tiddlywinks, or what we call in England, noughts and crosses. I can't remember what you Americans are. It's not interesting anymore. yeah it's like that's not interesting i want to play chess now i'm gonna go i'll play a video game that challenges i don't mind but that's not enough for me so there's something in us that craves challenge most people enjoy going out on the weekends and engaging in sport they're challenging their body right it's not effortless i don't want to someone else as i always said i want someone else to go to the gym for me that sort of somehow fails to understand the premise so there's that side in us which wants to be challenged wants to be surprised and be thoughtful And it's fighting this other thing.

51:44And what happens in life is that some people win that battle and others lose it. And I would like more people to win it, you know, and I feel that it is a battle. A battle that I fear the part that makes me maybe more pessimistic is that are we as a species becoming more resilient towards that? Because certainly the other side is becoming, you know, the temptation is only becoming more and more strongly weaponized. So unless we're sort of at least commensurately raising ourselves, are we sort of railing against a more and more powerful foe? But I suppose we'll have to be hopeful. You know, I don't know.

52:26And, you know, it was interesting. I remember when Christopher Nolan, whose brother I know, Jonah, made his Batman films. And I think everyone who went to see those films thought those were great. Yes. Those were good Batman films, right? And then we go to all these other Marvel DC movies and they're shit. Yes. Not all of them, but basically they are. But yeah, they're a very different category, right? They're in a different category. You go to the back and they say, wait a minute, that's a good one. And these are, they're fun. It's a roller coaster ride. No problem. And I think, to me, what he did there is proof that the human being knows the difference and can appreciate it.

53:11And it's our responsibility to provide those, right? I mean, you've talked about Cormac. You know, if you've read Cormac McCarthy, let's say you've read Blood Meridian, which is his masterpiece. and you've read some kind of whatever I'm not going to mention anyone because I'll get in trouble you know the difference of course but you have to have experienced that to know the difference if you haven't you'll say oh who don't be snobbish don't be elitist yes there is no hierarchy in the arts but there is and and I think it takes really having spent time with it and that's the thing I think we need to do right is we need to give people enough time with high quality ideas and they will know the difference.

53:58I don't think we should tell anyone what's better or worse. Just have the opportunity. Yes. I like this idea very much of complementary technologies and the optimistic part of me hopes that we're going to see people find ways to use LLMs and AI in this sort of more complementary way. Alan Kay was one of the guests of the podcast And he had such a brilliant way of just condensing the question, which is how much help is too much help? And I think that was a really good way of sort of putting it succinctly of like what we really want these technologies to do. You perhaps want them to educate you, but not give you the answer and guide you and so on and so forth.

54:40I know, Alan. I think that's a very nice way to put it. And I think, let me add to that. One of the areas that we work on at SFI is emergent engineering. which is engineering emergent systems that you don't fully control and the key concepts in emerging engineering are twofold one is improving signal to noise and the other one is improving gradient so when alan makes that point what he's really saying is i want to give you a gradient i don't want to give you the answer yes but i want to give you a path towards the answer and um and i think they're radically different yes and um i mean that's what good pedagogy education is it's not giving the answer it's saying this is how you can arrive at one and of course they're an infinite number yes that'll give you that then you'll have navigational tools for any problem so in this emergent engineering framework i think it makes explicit that point make the signal clear and provide mechanisms that induce in the problem space gradients what is the right way to protect one's mind against these temptations?

55:49Like, do you just choose to not use this technology at all in your day-to-day life? Do you sort of treat it more as if, you know, a brief investigation with it that you sort of figure out its capabilities and then try and really almost blockade yourself from it? How do you, what is a thinking person's best course of action? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think that i'm very interested in this concept of autonomy which is you know when you learn a mathematical science you solve problem sets right that's how you do it right you here's a problem solve it and you solve them on your own and they're ruthlessly truthful benchmarks of your capability and I'm interested in ruthlessly truthful benchmarks of capability and we could think carefully about that what that means for each of us and I feel as if it gets to the earlier point at the Alan Kay point and so I'm always testing myself right which is I think I know the answer do I know the answer can I do this on my own or do I need to ask someone else and it is actually you're part of my practice it's like going for a run in the morning right or meditating whatever it is you do yes um i think you have to develop this sit down with a pencil and paper and say do i understand it and it's interesting by the way because the current sort of renaissance in the zettel carsten and nicholas lumens way of organizing his knowledge is actually an effort i believe to encourage people to distill for themselves right the essence of an idea don't copy and paste it from wikipedia yes write it yourself in your language and i think that's that is actually a very nice example of what i'm talking about in terms of autonomy so i think people should be out there developing truthful benchmark benchmarks of their abilities i think it depends on the field but in the end right if i give you a violin and i say can you play this beautiful piece by Bach and you I mean you either can or you can't and weirdly enough that's why um AI now is so effective when the when ImageNet was introduced as a test all of a sudden there was a common standard for what it meant to do well everyone agreed it was like well can you do it or not is that an elephant or is it a bicycle and and I think we need our own build your own benchmarks That's a good practice.

58:31I'm going to do that for myself, I think. We've talked a little bit about Cormac McCarthy, and I'd love to talk a little bit more. I think in his last two books, Stella Maris and the Passenger, you see so much of the influence of SFI on his thinking and how he was really spending his days at the Institute to a certain extent. What do you think his legacy is at SFI? We're reversing the roles a little bit there. i think it's interesting i think there are many one is what does the single-minded pursuit of excellence look like okay uh that you can never get enough of that i really believe that i'm extremely gung-ho for that deep sense of mentorship or apprenticeship or whatever you want to call it which is i think the only way to really know is if you're lucky enough to spend time in the company And it doesn't matter what it is.

59:28It could be a swimming coach. I think it, but you know, oh, that's what it means to really strive to be excellent. And I think he, regardless of how different his medium was, he wasn't writing science papers. That was evident to everybody. And that's true for all of our Miller scholars. We have a whole program of other writers as well, of course. He was a reader before he was a writer. People don't realize this. And at some point I might write something on this. He read everything. And he read a lot of stuff he told the public he didn't like. And so I remember when I first met him and we were talking about Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov.

1:00:15He said, oh, I don't like them. Wow. No kidding. Yeah. But years later, he recited to me from memory the first page of Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. and it was like okay i see i see what you mean by not liking right not liking means reading it and not liking it or or my my earlier remark about how you deal with knowledge break it down as opposed to being ignorant of it which is a completely different game so i thought that his engagement with all of this world that didn't necessarily show up in the work that he produced that we know that was important and also the thing i really interested in him was how he carved out time for himself or space for himself to to think where he was apparently non-productive i mean essentially that where would you find corme mccarthy and santa fe at the santa fe institute at baskin robbins having an ice cream coffee ice cream or watching a movie he understood that the number of productive hours in a day is you could count on the fingers of one hand optimistically and that he needed to gather himself together and so he was not in the slightest bit interested in in in um say he's been interested in posturing productivity if he was bored he'd get up and go get nice i mean he didn't he didn't hang around and do nothing and i think part of the reason he was able to do that is because he never used a computer typewriter right only a typewriter but but more importantly no internet no there was no such thing for him wow and the rest of us unfortunately yes when we get bored we all know what we do right we say what email have i got or what's 100 things should i look up on the web and i think so our time gets filled with a kind of low quality busyness whereas his time is filled with sort of high quality hedonism whatever that was for him and i think to see that in practice and to see how beautiful his work was and how productive he was i think that's important to know it's like oh i see you don't have to do all this nonsense it's okay it's okay that when you're working you're working with an extraordinary focus.

1:02:37But when you're not, it's fine. You don't have to do all sorts of rubbish that actually isn't one. Wow. There's so many lovely tidbits there that I think about. One of them, well, one, I love that he sort of disdained Pale Fire, but clearly had memorized it so much. And to a certain extent, it makes sense because there is such a stylistic difference between them. But on the other hand, I think if you had to pick maybe the two great stylists of the 20th century, you would arguably pick those two, or at least I would. So anyway, fascinating. But it also strikes me that it sort of gets at the heart of, you'll have to remind me exactly the pronunciation, is it the kekulele problem?

1:03:19The kekulele? Yes. Thank you. Kekule, kekule. Kekule. The idea that, which is basically the idea that the subconscious arrived before language that Cormac wrote about. In a way, I wonder if that hedonistic time was him allowing the subconscious to do its work. Absolutely. That is the correct conclusion. I think he understood better than the rest of us that the way you cultivate the unconscious is different to the way you cultivate the conscious mind it has different gyms right it has different exercise regimens and they're not the same and and it turns out and we know this actually from the writings of the great mathematician Poincaré and Hadamard where they studied the unconscious processes of mathematicians including Einstein actually where they were very interested in this idea of what is the kind of leisure time that contributes to solving hard problems and it had nothing to do with solving the hard problem it really was about the obvious stuff like spend time in the woods or whatever it is things that we're told to do all the time walk yeah all thinking is walking as far as i'm concerned yes and so right and i but again it doesn't come to us from our education at school that sort of insight It comes to me from spending time with extraordinary minds that seem to violate so much that I was told to do.

1:05:01Yes. We mentioned Wittgenstein earlier and seems to be an obsession both for you and for Cormac. What do you think it was about him that sort of managed to unite both of you coming from very different disciplines, but in this sort of deep fascination? First of all, I remember when I was 17 in a bookshop in Chelsea and in London, and I found, I saw this slim little volume with the title Tractatus. To me, that was like, what? So like this occult knowledge. What is that thing? I didn't know what it meant, but I have no idea what it meant. and so I pulled it out of the shelves and I was not disappointed because when I opened it in hand you know that beautiful enumeration of propositions each of which was a kind of little bit of poetry in its own right I mean it's like is this what is this book is this I don't know what this book is and so me of course I bought it and I spent the rest of my time obsessing over it and then of course you learn about the origins of the project and his time with Bertrand Russell and G.E.

1:06:09Moore at Cambridge. And the problems he was wrestling is his influence on the positivists. And then his own life, his interest in architecture. By the way, that's very important because Cormac started as an architect. Wittgenstein spent time doing architecture, a house that he made for his sister, which he never lived in because he thought it was so brutal. But nevertheless, nowadays we love it because It was very modern. And his life in the trenches, his bravery in the war, and his austerity, he was a kind of monastic figure. He came from one of the richest families in Austria, lived in palaces, gave it all away, and lived in a hut in Norway.

1:06:48So he's a kind of... He fulfills many latent desires, doesn't he? Because he created a work sort of out of whole cloth. He was quite disdainful of, talk about your earlier question about knowledge. Of course, he was much more knowledgeable than he let on, like Cormac. I mean, so well-educated because of his wealth, right? Exactly. And the access to extraordinary figures at the time, when Vienna was sort of, you know, the New York, it was an extraordinary sort of... So it's his life. It's his work. Of course, the content of his philosophy as well, because it's worth remembering. people remember, of course, the two translations, in English at least, Ramsey's translation of the Tractatus and Elizabeth Anscombe's translation of philosophical investigations, both whose graves I've gone to visit in Cambridge.

1:07:43Oh, wow. But of course, he wrote all these other books on the philosophy of mathematics, on the philosophy of psychology that weren't published in his lifetime. And that's the other thing. He was a polymath, like a novelist. He covered so much territory. So interesting, if you were to visit our campus here, we have two campuses. One of them is the Miller campus. When you enter, there is the Wittgenstein mural. Oh, wow. And on the Wittgenstein mural is Proposition 1.13, not one and not six, which everyone knows. And Proposition 1.13, which is the FAPS in logical space of the world. And that's a homage to Cormac.

1:08:26It's a homage to Bill Miller, who supported the campus. And of course, I can do it because it's my interest as well. And so he's very important. And Wittgenstein's biographer, Ray Monk, spent time with us. And that book was extremely important for Cormat. He considered it one of, I think it's fair to say, one of maybe the two greatest biographies ever written. Certainly Ray Monk's biggest. And the other one would be Elman's Joyce. And it was Elman's Joyce that really convinced him that he had to be a novelist. Huh, I never do that. Wow, how fascinating. I think you've said before that there was sort of nothing less interesting to him than discussing his own work.

1:09:12Within the world of literature, what was worth his energy to him, you know, beyond his work? Were there, you know, maybe Nabokov was not up to snuff, but what did he actually like talking about? Well, he liked talking about everything, except his own writing. Yes. Right. And so that's important. I didn't think there was anything he wasn't interested in talking about. That's something to bear in mind. And, I mean, I really mean that quite sincerely. I mean, and I think in that article I wrote on him, I give a list of some of the things we talked about. And pretty much everything, right? Yes. In terms of reading, though, I mean, I think the way it worked with him is that in his youth, he read everything in the world of fiction.

1:09:57Not everything, but a lot. More than you might imagine. And very carefully, I mean, I lent him books over the years and they always came back with scribbles all over them. And yeah, his books are highly annotated. So he was a careful reader. Nietzsche once said he defined a philosopher of someone who reads with a pencil. And I think to that extent, he was a philosopher. As he aged, he settled on a few writers who he loved. And of course, preeminent among them was Melville. I think he considered Moby Dick just without peer and I'm not sure I agree with that but there's no doubt that it's kind of a divinely inspired work of literature but then huge numbers of biographies and then books on everything if you go to his library very interested in philosophy very interested in the philosophy of mathematics philosophy of physics and um and everything else.

1:10:54I mean, you know, it's six volumes on rattlesnakes of Texas or, you know, it just didn't matter. He was, if you think about Judge Holden from Blood Meridian, the model of his voraciousness is Cormac himself. Wow, fascinating. And in some respects, in The Kid, I see some of that wise infant energy that we talked about earlier, perhaps not genius in that sort of sense but there's something about that having almost being a two sides of a spectrum both old and young at the same time you know that is very true i mean i mean that his interest in in frank lloyd wright um is very similar i think he's very interested in these people who are or at least constellations that do both well he's not really interested in the middle ground very much right so you either get to be a kind of wunderkind naive where you're sort of effortlessly brilliant and you're kind of by practice an iconoclast because not because you want to be because but because you are yes and then on the other end as you say these kinds of polymathic sensibility of wanting to devour the ninth and eleventh edition of the of the britannica yes and And I think he felt himself over the course of his life occupying those two roles.

1:12:22In an interview from a long time ago, you were asked if you could ask an omniscient higher being scientific questions, what they might be. And I really liked your answer and I wanted to follow up on it. Your answer was, does physics plus enough time imply life? Does life plus enough time imply intelligence? and does intelligence plus enough time imply consciousness? Does consciousness plus enough time imply catastrophe? I followed you. And then to the last sentence, I wondered why in your mind, consciousness plus time might imply catastrophe. Yeah. I mean, I think about that in sort of through three lenses, I think.

1:13:02um one is let's call it existential one is strategic game theoretic and the other one is technological in reverse order right technological is what we're experiencing now we build machines we infuse them with facts we give them agency and they annihilate us that's the That's the preferred marketing speak of large tech companies. That's possible. The strategic game theoretic one is, of course, mutually assured destruction, right? I mean, that's the doomsday device. Yes. That we think through our consciousness and our own sense of malice that others feel as we do, and we preempt them. right yes and and so in the process we initiate a red queen dynamic whose resolution is our annihilation and the existential one is a kind of malaise it's the other outcome of the of the other two in a way i mean technology that makes us a kind of surrogate proxy for itself strategic machinations that make us despair and we kind of fold into ourselves and disappear it's a kind of omega point of human consciousness that just annihilates itself out of desperation and i mean i know it all sounds rather miserable but i think that's what i was thinking when i answered the question i think that's fascinating um well as we sort of reach the end here there's a few questions that I always like to sort of end with that are more abstract and philosophical.

1:14:56One is, if you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what's an experiment you would really like to run? So I hate the idea of unlimited resources. There's nothing more boring to me than unlimited resources. Everything that I've ever seen that's great works under constraint. You know, that's famous Robert Frost, you know, poetry without verses like tennis without a net. And I really believe that. And I feel that there's something enormously invigorating and thought inducing in overcoming obstacles. So I don't want unlimited resources. Thank you very much. It would be too much of a cheat code.

1:15:39It's a cheat. It's a cheat code. Yeah. Why play the game? Yeah, exactly. No, that makes sense. Actually, no one said that before, but I understand that. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of weird. People think they want more, but more just makes a kind of a maximum entropy distribution over possibilities. I want to be, you know, if you think about it, constraint forces you to double down on what you do well. With his new constraints, you can talk about anything and it doesn't matter. There are no consequences. There have to be consequences. So I'm a real constraint junkie. Fascinating. What tradition or practice from another culture or era do you think we should more widely adopt today?

1:16:27I think I love this. Yes. You know, I was born in Hawaii. My father was in the Air Force, US Air Force. And I'm a huge admirer of Polynesian navigation. And I think that that appreciation of what Timothy Morton came to call a hyper object, this massive object, that's the Pacific Ocean, right? This dynamical system that has these hidden currents and forms of order that you have to learn in order to navigate in the open ocean in an extraordinary way. So learning the world's hyper objects is, I get from Polynesia. I think from Japan, this aesthetic of the worn, you know, that there's beauty in the old and in the imperfect.

1:17:28You know, the cheap up that's not perfectly. Exactly. And I think that's just beautiful. It is. And it's very interesting. If you go, where in the world do you find the best preserved old technology? Well, it's beautiful old cars in Cuba. and its electronics in Japan. And they just have the deepest respect. They give burials to machines and electronic gadgets. So there's something there which is so deeply, presumably rooted in their Shinto origins. But I very much admire that. I think from Germany and England, certainly England in the 19th century and Germany in the 18th and 19th, the pursuit of these giant synthetic works.

1:18:08I'm thinking about Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, um uh james fraser's the golden bow um emmanuel kant's three critiques um schopenhauer's the world is will and representation these are these massive lifelong projects to bring it all together and they always fail but they're always exquisitely beautiful right i love that i love that and maybe italy not contemporary so again well maybe partly the the way that in italy under people like the palladian architecture or in the 20th century scarpa on certain piranese turned mathematics and geometry into physical form so to be in a brunelleschi building is like to be in a theorem and i love that and i think that in in the age of disposable environments Yes.

1:19:06I want to move into a timeless platonic environment. And I think I feel that more strongly in Italy than anywhere else. I'm sure I could go on, but those are some that I. Oh, gosh, that was that was an amazing collection. OK, sort of last question. If you had the power to assign a book to everyone on Earth to read and understand, what would you like to give them? I say choose your own adventure. Hmm. Very good. I don't think we should tell people that. you'll find meaning in something that you find. So told to read, it's like being at school, ruins everything. Yes. It takes the pleasure out of it.

1:19:42It does. There's nothing more exquisite than believing, like I did with the Tractatus, that you discovered it for yourself and that no one else knows about it. Amazing. Well, David, this was such a joy and thank you so, so very much for spending your time with me. You're welcome. Thank you very much for good questions. Thank you. That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions, so if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one.

1:20:19For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future. Thank you.