YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Garland

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65
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2020-03-03
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2020-03-03
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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “But at least my sense of it, I might be wrong, but my sense of it is that The algorithms have an either conscious or unconscious bias, which is created by the people who are making the algorithms. Sort of delineating the areas to which those algorithms are going to lean. And so, for example, the kind of thing I'd be worried about is that it hasn't been thought about enough how dangerous it is to allow algorithms to create echo chambers, say. But that doesn't seem to me to be about the AI or the algorithm. It's the naivety of the people who are constructing the algorithms to do that thing, if you see what I mean.”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Does not anything that's new, I don't think, for example, I've got my anxieties relate to things like social media. So I've got plenty of anxieties about that.”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “There is, but there's a counterpoint as well, which is that most parents would wish for a better life for their children. So there may be a regret about some things about the past, but broadly speaking, what people really want is that things will be better for the future generations, not worse. And so, and then it's a question about what constitutes a future generation. A future generation could involve people. It also could involve machines and it could involve a sort of cross-pollinated version of the two or any, but none of those things make me feel anxious.”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The other thing is it seems like there's all sorts of things that you could put into a machine that you would not be. So with us, we sort of roughly try to give some rules to live by and some of us then live by those rules and some don't. And with a machine, it feels like you could enforce those things. partly because of our previous experience and partly because of the different nature of a machine, I just don't feel anxious about it. more I just see all the good that broadly speaking the good that can come from it but that that's just my that's just where I am on that anxiety spectrum”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I mean, it's a huge subject to talk about, I suppose. But one of the things I think is that humans are actually very experienced at creating new life forms because that's why you and I are both here. And it's why everyone on the planet is here. And so something in the process of having a living thing that exists that didn't exist previously is very much encoded into the structures of our life and the structures of our societies doesn't mean we always get it right, but it does mean we've learnt quite a lot about that. We've learnt quite a lot about what the dangers are of allowing things to be unchecked. And it's why we then create systems of checks and balances in our government and so on and so forth. I mean, that's not to say...”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, it's interesting the spread of discussions and the spread of anxieties that exist about AI fascinate me. The way in which some people are, some people seem terrified about it whilst also pursuing it. And I've never shared that fear about AI personally, but the way in which it agitates people and also the people who it agitates I find kind of fascinating.”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And then I'm trying to marshal that into a narrative to say, look, this stuff is interesting. And it's also relevant. And this is my best shot at it. So I'm the one being influenced in my construction.”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, the people that you're implying maybe I would influence, to me it's exactly the other way around. These people are strongly influencing me. I'm thinking they're doing something fascinating. I'm concentrating and working as hard as I can to try and understand the implications of what they say. And in some ways, often what I'm trying to do is disseminate their ideas into a means by which it can enter a public conversation. So ex-Machina contains lots of name checks, all sorts of existing thought experiments, you know, shadows on Plato's cave and Mary in the black and white room and all sorts of different long-standing thought processes about sentience or consciousness or subjectivity or gender or whatever it happens to be.”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Now, so I'm a pretty smart guy. And if I said to myself, I want to really, really understand what is currently the state of quantum mechanics or string theory or any of the sort of branching areas of it, I wouldn't be able to. I'd be intellectually incapable of doing it. Because to work in those fields at the moment is a bit like being an athlete. I suspect you need to start when you're 12. And if you start in your mid-20s, start trying to understand in your mid-20s, then you're...”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, all I could say is that from my point of view, it's almost exactly the reverse because I I see that pretty much everything I do is a reaction to what scientists are doing. I'm an interested layperson. And I feel this individual, I feel that the most interesting area that humans are involved in is science. I think art is very, very interesting, but the most interesting is science. Science is in a weird place because maybe around the time Newton was alive, if a very, very interested layperson said to themselves, I want to really understand what Newton is saying about the way the world works with a few years of dedicated thinking, they would be able to understand the sort of principles he was laying out. I don't think that's true anymore. I think that stopped being true.”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Because anytime I tried to Look into how it might work, I would then inevitably be attaching my kind of thought processes into it. And I wanted to try and put a bubble around it where I would say, no, this is alien in its most alien form. I have no real point of contact.”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “But this is the interesting thing as soon as you say they're biologist, you've done the thing of attributing human type motivations to it. I was trying to free myself from anything. Like that, so all sorts of questions you might answer about this notional alien, I wouldn't be able to answer because I don't know what it was or how it worked. I had some rough ideas, like it had a very, very, very slow clock speed. And I thought maybe the way it is interacting with this environment is a little bit like the way an octopus will change its color forms around the space that it's in. So it's sort of reacting to what it's in to an extent, but the reason it's reacting in that way is indeterminate.”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, or it could be the same laws, could be the same underlying laws of physics. It's a machine created or it's a creature created in a quantum mechanical way. It just ends up in a very, very different place to the one we end up in. So part of the preoccupation with annihilation was to come up with an alien that was really alien and didn't give us And it didn't give us, and we didn't give it any kind of easy connection between human and the alien. Because I think it was to do with the idea that you could have an alien that landed on this planet that wouldn't even know we were here. And we might only glancingly know it was here. There'd just be this strange point where the Venn diagrams connected, where we could sense each other or something like that.”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “In any way like us. It didn't share it. Maybe it had a completely different clock speed. Maybe its way. So we're talking about, we're looking at each other. We're getting information light hits our optic nerve. Our brain makes the best guess of what we're doing. Sometimes it's right. The thing we were talking about before, what if this alien doesn't have an optic nerve? Maybe it's a way of encountering the space it's in is wholly different. Maybe it has a different relationship with gravity.”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “One of the things I was trying to do in Annihilation was to offer up a form of alien life that was actually alien because It would often seem to me that in the way we would represent aliens in books or cinema or television or any one of the sort of storytelling mediums is we would always give them very human-like qualities. So they wanted to teach us about galactic federations or they wanted to eat us or they wanted our resources like our water or they want to enslave us or whatever it happens to be but all of these are incredibly human like motivations. And I was interested in the idea of an alien that was not”

    2020-03-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source