#662: David Deutsch and Naval Ravikant The Fabric of Reality, The Importance of Disobedience, The Inevitability of Artificial General Intelligence, Finding Good Problems, Redefining Wealth, Foundations of True Knowledge, Harnessing Optimism, Quantum Computing, and More

I don't think we're anywhere near [AGI] yet ... AI has nothing to do with AGI; it's a completely different technology, and it is, in many ways, the opposite of AGI.

Politicians and trolls on the Internet want there to be a definite answer that is supported by science. 'We're following the science.' Science isn't a thing of that kind. Thinking of science as a thing of that kind is totally equivalent to expecting your religion to tell you the answer.

Unless the laws of physics explicitly forbid it, we can figure it out. And if we can figure it out, we can build it. It may take more time, it may take more resources. But humans are, sort of, universal explainers or universal computers; and to date, we have found no law of physics that is a barrier and says that things are not understandable.

What we know of the universe at the moment is the universe in the past. Everything we see is in the past. And the deeper we look into the universe, the deeper into the past we look.

I don't believe in curricular. I don't believe in set subjects or in narrow subjects. Something that interests you is going to be the way to find out what you should be learning.

It is more important that I have a disobedient child than an obedient child ... It is fundamentally that disobedience that allows the creativity to come up with new ideas, and it is that creativity that separates us from the robots...

It seems to me that [Alan] Turing settled the issue and put icing on the cake, linking it with quantum theory, that AGI is definitely possible and that thinking is definitely a form of computation.

Science begins with myths. Good explanations begin with bad explanations. You get there between the bad explanation and the good explanation by criticism— conjecturing variants of the story, and then criticizing both them and the original story, and then choosing the one that survives the criticism. And then you can move on from there to better things.

Other than violating the laws of physics, there is no other impediment to us achieving something in the world. And that's not only the physical world, it's also solving human problems—because human problems are just a species of computation.

The art of making a good AI is to limit its possibilities tremendously; you limit them a trillion-fold ... There a trillion ways of being wrong for every way of being right.

There's a rule of thumb, the hierarchy rule, that large things are not affected by small things. It's not a law of nature; it is an accidental feature of the very early universe.

Humans are people. AGIs, when they're built, will be people. Extraterrestrial civilizations will consist of people. And they're are all fundamentally the same...

What makes a good explanation? It's that it can't be easily varied and still account for the same thing.

Explanation that involves the supernatural is intrinsically not a good explanation.

If you think that you can only get your way by crippling somebody's brain, then you haven't got much confidence that you are right in the first place.

I don't think an AGI will require very much computer power. What it will require is a new philosophical theory of what this program is supposed to do. What is the thing that it does, which can be described in a hand waving way as not chopping off any possibilities?

The set of all transformations that you are capable of bringing about, that is your wealth. And obviously, if optimism is true, then there's no limit to wealth.

Resources are things that we create through knowledge rather than some finite, static, fixed set of things that we burn through and use up.

Whereas for most of human history that was exactly what you were forbidden to do. The idea was that we already had all the important knowledge. If you wanted to discover something new, what you had to make sure of was that it didn't contradict the existing knowledge. Now, you have to make sure that it does contradict the existing knowledge.

All knowledge, not just scientific knowledge, begins with a problem and then continues with conjectures.

We start with a problem, we have conjectures, and experiment is pointless unless we have some kind of conflict that we want to resolve.