YouSaid · the spoken record

Danny Hillis

lines on the record: 162
first: 2024-12-11
most recent: 2024-12-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Interfering with this process, which is different in every form of cancer. So once you start looking at it as kind of a runtime thing rather than something that you have,”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then where's the action happening? Well, the action is happening at the levels of proteins being expressed and proteins interacting. So even if I knew all your genes, I don't know what your proteins are doing. I know maybe what possible proteins are, but proteins after they get produced by the genes, they modify each other and they also come in by food and the bacteria are got and everything like that. So what you really want to see is the proteins what's happening in the proteins. And nobody had a way of looking at the proteins. So we started developing a way that you could take a drop of blood or eventually a cell and look at all, just measure all the proteins in it and see how that changed with time. And we started doing it with mice and studying, you know, as they got cancer, we could see how the proteins changed and the cascades. And then you could look at ways of interacting.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody else can solve it. So that was the way I got into biology. A doctor named David Agus. It was an oncologist who was really frustrated with his abilities to diagnose and treat cancer. Came to me and said, you know, we've got a problem here. Cancer is all these different things and the paradigm we have for treating things just isn't working for it. I started talking with them about it. And that led to a big collaboration. One of the things that we realized was in some sense cancering isn't something you have like a disease. It's something that you do. Like your body does, and your body is constantly doing, and your body is probably cancering right now in three or four different ways. But usually it deals Stops it, and occasionally it gets out of control. So, if you start thinking of it more like a verb,”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I read enough papers that I have questions, you know, because you're wasting the time of a Marva Minsky or Richard Feynman if you don't ask him something that makes them think. And so I would say most of my learning was from the people, not the papers, but I always do homework beforehand to sort of see where the interesting questions are. And in some sense, that's easier to do when you're coming into a field from the outside because the people inside the field have already kind of settled on a set of questions is the important question. But if you don't know much, it's sort of easier for you to see sort of the big holes that are missing. And sometimes your questions are dumb. And they explain to you why they're dumb questions. But sometimes they're like, yeah, that's actually a pretty interesting fundamental question. And, you know, if you can hit on one of those, that gets you into a conversation.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He kept on, you know, every summer he would come to thinking machines. And of course, we got more serious tasks. And he actually started the first quantum computing project at Thinking Machines. So we were, again, a bit ahead of our time on that, probably way too ahead of our time.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he came, he was actually showed up on the first day, which is in the middle of summer, and he shows up. And of course, starting a company, you got like worrying about closing finance and things like that. And I wasn't really thinking like, what's everybody going to actually do when we get all this set up on the first day? And he shows up the first day. He salutes. He says, Richard Feynman, we're putting for duty, sir. What would you like me to do? And I'm like, oh, I haven't really thought about this. So I think we're taking, I said, how would you do quantum electrodynamics on a parallel computer? And he's like, that's what you want on the first day. It's like, is that really what you need doing? And I was like, well, actually, the truth of the matter is we don't have any like pencils or paper. Nobody's gotten any supplies. He's got, great, I'll be quartermaster. And so he goes out and he gets the supplies. That was kind of his first job.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or hire as interns or something like that that might be interested in working on this. And Feynman said, you know, now he said, none of my students are crazy enough to work on something like that. I mean, that's nuts. And it's just a kooky idea. That's what he said. That's a kooky idea. And he said, well, he says, actually, maybe there's this one guy I know that would work on it. You might hire him for a summer job, you know. But he doesn't really know much about computers, but he's a really hard worker and I think he's pretty smart. And I was like, okay, well, that's good enough recommendation for me. What's his name? He said, Richard Feynman. Yeah.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Richard Feynman was the Nobel Prize winning physicist that invented Feynman diagrams and quantum electrodynamics and a lot of other basic techniques that everybody uses in physics. One of the youngest people that was on the Manhattan Project, so totally brilliant, but also just a lot of fun. And we really hit it off, liked him a lot, and thought he was super smart. And so when I was starting machines, I wanted him involved somehow. So I went to visit him at Caltech. And he invited me to stay at his house. I explained to him building this parallel computer and said, you know, do you think you have any students that we could hire?”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was going to give the Feynman example And that was a fun one too because I had met Richard Feynman at a conference and we had really hit it off.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I come from Marvin Minsky. I say, you know, I think there's an error here. And Marvin looks at it and he's, oh, yeah, yeah, that seems wrong. Fix it. And I was like, well, you fixed on the diagram. I mean, he's like, I'm not fixed on the diagram, fix it on the machine, you know, just fix it. Okay. So then I look around and I find something else I go to mine with them. I said, don't ask me every time. Just like fix the problems. So after a while, I just started working there. And I think Marvin just sort of assumed I work for him. And then eventually, you know, everybody, I mean, after I'm there for a few weeks and everybody else would get tired and go home in the morning, then Marvin, at some point he was like, we're going. You need to ride someplace. I'm like, oh, I need to go back by anywhere. He's like, yeah, why don't you just like crash in my basement? So I kind of moved into Marvin's basement. Eventually, I mentioned a Marvin that I didn't actually have a job and he gave me one. But I still sort of had my job at Logo working for Seymour. But, you know, that was how I got into the AI lab and started working for.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Building it. I talked to Marvin Minsky's office. Marvin's never there. After a while, I make friends, and where's Marvin? And it's like, oh, he comes in at night and he's working downstairs in the basement. And he's building something which is a personal computer. And I was like, okay, that's great. But I had the key. You couldn't get into the basement without the key either. But I had the key. So sure enough, I go down there at night and there's Marvin Minsky with his graduate students around him. In those days, they were wire wrapping machines and there were the diagrams lying around all over the place of the computer. And of course, I'm too shy to talk to Marvin and I don't really have anything useful to say to Marvin. So I just sort of look around and I look around at the diagrams of the computers and I notice a mistake on Monopoly.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, people thought this was very impractical because we had to convince people someday every school will have a computer. Was considered very implausible at the time, but that was our stretch idea there, that someday every school would have a computer. So I had a physical way that you could kind of program it by putting these. And so I got hired and I got a key to the building. Okay, so now I'm in the building.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I invented something called the slot machine, which is a way of programming logo with pictures. So you could arrange pictures. And actually the squeak language is kind of the electronic version of what I invented. But I invented physical things that you put together. Make a logo program.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, I didn't give him all that backstory. I just said, hey, here's a really cool way I've come up with for kids that don't know how to re- and write a program computers. He's like, oh, I've been looking for that.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I read them and they came across there was one thing where they said, you know, we think it's actually important that young kids program computers and we think even kids that can't read and write should program it. We don't know how to do that yet, but we think it's important. I was like, oh, they don't know how to do it yet. So I will invent a way for kids who can't read and write to program computers. So I went off and I invented this picture way where you manipulated blocks. And then that was enough. That proposal was enough to get me an interview with Seymour Pepper.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I did slip in a few times, but that wasn't going to work. It was pretty high security. Barbara was paying for all of the lab, and I got their proposals and the proposals to NSF. And I read their proposals to see what is I could possibly offer here. And I read their proposals.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so Marvin Minsky is the person who named artificial intelligence. He and John McCarthy kind of founded the field. So when I went to MIT, I kind of knew that I wanted to do artificial intelligence. And I had read about Marvin Minsky. So I knew I wanted to work for Marvin Minsky. And I had to figure out how to do it. And the AI lab was sort of locked up in technology square. It was hard to even physically get into it. And you couldn't get into it unless you had a key and you couldn't get a key unless you had a job there. So I decided, okay, first thing I got to get into the building.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe it just requires a lot of overconfidence. So, of course, it always turns out to be harder than your thing. But I guess I am gravitated toward learning new things. And I've also developed the ability to kind of search out the people who really know the thing. and hang out with them. So find the people that really understand it. Hang out with it, learn it. And so it's not that I know things other people don't, but maybe I know a different combination of things that other people do know. And I'm kind of willing to learn the things I don't know and kind of have a technique of doing. I was just hanging out with people who are smarter than I am.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you will actually shift to this. And this is there's sort of two completely different layers of cybersecurity that have nothing to do with each other. So you'll have the kind of layer that we have right now that we depend on, which is the endpoints kind of protect themselves. So they force you to log in and identify yourself or exchange certificates. That will all still exist, but completely independently of that will be something like it'll be zero trust packet routing or something like that where the network itself is kind of aware of who's sending the message is, what permissions they have. And it's actually aware of the identity and sort of strongly authenticated identity of it. That's a completely different system than we have now. So I think that two-layer system, actually the defender has the advantage instead of right now, the attacker has the advantage.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“an overlay to start on the current internet. So people are starting to do that now. Now, Oracle just announced a product that their cloud is going to start using this protocol. And so I think that that's going to cause a big shift in the Internet eventually because it sort of gets at the foundational problem that sort of no sane company would have looked at as a business opportunity. And it probably isn't a business opportunity because it probably has to be open and a standard or something like that. But I think it's going to actually help the good guys and actually make the world a better place.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we knew what we knew today, if we actually understood what cybersecurity was like, how people were really using computers, things like that. And, you know, that's a non-starter for anybody, any normal commercial company to ask that question, because obviously you're not going to replace internet protocol. But it was a great hypothetical that kind of captured a bunch of very smart people's imagination. And we got together and invented something called zero trust packet routing where every packet carries a kind of a passport and a visa that proves it has permission to go where it's going. So the network itself kind of has a policy. It doesn't try to deliver everything to everything. It delivers things that are allowed to go to where they're allowed to go. And then it turned out after we built that that actually we looked at and said, you know, we could build this as kind of.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And so you can come up with very clever ways of guessing, but then as soon as you do that, somebody can come up with a very clever way of getting around your heuristic of guessing. And ultimately, the attackers have the advantage if the packets are anonymous. And so clearly the right thing is to have the network have a policy of what it delivers. In some sense, we do that a little bit with firewalls if you try to see, oh, this is a bad packet, I'll cut it off or something. But again, you sort of have to guess where it came from or what it's doing to do that. So I've got together a bunch of people that had been involved in the early days of the internet and had built all kinds of things on top of it and had used it for very high security applications and things like that and said, how would we have designed internet protocol?”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is because everybody hides the break ins and so on. But everybody agrees it's getting worse rapidly. And the defense is losing against offense. And if you step back and really look at it, the reason that it's bad is because the internet was built on a sort of flawed foundation. The basic idea of IP internet protocol was that you'd look at a packet and if it wanted to go someplace, you'd move it in that direction. And it was explicitly stated in the design principles that security was not the problem of the networks, because security was the problem of the thing that got the packet. And the packet can kind of claim to be from anywhere So you get this flood of packets being delivered to you. You have no idea really where they came from, and you have to kind of guess what are the good ones and which are the bad ones.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think that was the one that really made me have faith in it. There's something wrong with MDAL's law, because actually at the time I couldn't tell you what the flaw was and the proof of MDAL's law. It was pretty convincing. And now I can go back and tell you that the flaw was it assumed that you just kept doing the same size problem. But of course, if you have a bigger, faster computer, you do a bigger problem. And so you don't just use the same problem. That's the reason cloud computing works and these giant parallel machines work is because you use gigantic problems on them. And if you tried to use the little problem that you were running on a single computer, they wouldn't be very efficient. But anyway, I didn't see that flaw at the time. I'll give you an example of something we're doing now that sort of fits that. Cybersecurity. Everybody agrees cybersecurity is a mess. Ransoms are going up. Nobody knows even how big it is.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In other words, if somebody else is going to do it, why should you do it? You're wasting your time. It's like there's some reason nobody's doing it. And, you know, in the case of the parallel computing thing, it was this crazy thing called Amdal's Law, which seemed to prove that it was impossible. And so you have to say, there's a unique reason why we're going to do this. We're doing something that won't get done otherwise or won't get done for a long time or won't get done right. So we only take projects like that. And that one's a tough self-discipline to enforce, but we do do it.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's a kind of practical aspect to it that I probably didn't do in the early days. I tended to do the things way too early before they made any financial sense. So now we have that bit of discipline added to it. But then the third thing that we do, which, and this is the hardest thing to do, and we call it the non-redundancy criterion, because by then you've got a project somebody's excited about you know it's going to make money and why would you say no well the answer is you would say no if it's going to happen anyway”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the partners that are not the one that's the most excited about it. And often I'm no one that's excited about it. The other partners get to look at it and say, does this make any financial sense? And it can make financial sense. Guaranteed not to lose too much money on it, or it could make financial sense because there's a small chance of making a lot of money on it. Or, you know, you have to have a portfolio of those things. But that sort of has to be evaluated by different people than the one that's most excited about”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it was out there to be done, and I had a reason to believe that it would work. So that's a kind of example of sort of seeing the preconditions are all there. Now, that required incredible amount of work on tens of thousands of great engineers to get it to that point. So in some sense, all I had to do was take advantage of each of these pieces that were already there and put them together. Right now, it's very formal what we decide to work on because our partners that applied mention, we put three tests on things. One of them is that one of the senior partners has to be really excited about it. Usually because it has some big impact on the world, or sometimes it's because it's just really cool technology. But usually it's because they see it has potential for big impact.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the human brain has these very slow components, much slower than transistors. So I was like, well, maybe they won't be general purpose computers, but if you're going to make AI, certainly that's the way to do it. So I had some confidence that doing the thing in the unexpected way was going to work and the preconditions were there that I could design CMOS chips, make those work, build them, compiler technology was at the right place. television cameras were starting to produce digital things so that you could have eyes digital eyes on machines so all the preconditions of converting audio to bits were there so all the pieces were kind of coming together and the only reason it wasn't being done was this sort of prejudice that it was impossible which was sort of created for commercial reasons I think”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and also there were all these kind of reasons why people thought it was impossible. I mean, it's hard to believe. And it took a while to understand why they were wrong. You know, it hadn't been done. But I knew it was possible because I knew the human brain worked.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, parallel computing is what you do in the cloud when you have lots and lots of computers that you put onto a problem, or you do it on a single chip now that is a multi-core chip that has multiple processors on it. It's so obvious now. It doesn't seem like an idea.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perfect example was parallel computers. It sort of now seems totally obvious like how could anybody have not built parallel computers. But at the time, there were some pieces that weren't quite there yet until you got the ability to put multiple processors on a piece of silicon that required a certain level of complexity of the silicon production technology. So nobody had done that. So I made the first multi-core chips. And it was also, there were proofs that computers became less and less efficient the more processors that you added to them. There was something called Amdahl's law that was how IBM Basically pooped parallel computers or people like Cray said you didn't need them.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So first of all, since I sort of loved the process of invention, I have to say that I think it's a misunderstood process because what the inventor does is actually a very small piece of it. Society does is it creates these preconditions for invention. And once those preconditions are in place, then it's just a matter of sort of putting together the puzzle pieces and making it work. So I always love to see those moments where all the pieces are around and somebody just needs to. And usually they're not recognized because they're looked at by different people. They're in different disciplines and things like that.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Human intelligence can live that's not human. And the human intelligence is all of the things that was learned from all the data that we train on in some sense. And this is the early stages. So you might say it's just kind of imitating right now, but it's got so many examples that's really good at imitating. And that's always sort of the first part of intelligence is imitation. I mean, child begins with imitation, then they understand more and more. So I think we're in that imitation stage right now where we've built machines that are able to do a pretty good job of imitating and they'll go beyond. They're just beginning to peek beyond the imitation stage, reason, things like that. But in the end, it's not really an artificial intelligence. It's human intelligence on an artificial substrate.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the ideas got better and better at helping the monkeys because that's how they got repeated. And so we're sort of a symbiosis of those two things, of the monkeys and the song. So this songs in some sense evolved into human culture and human ideas. And we evolved into the monkeys that were able to hold those ideas and transfer those ideas. And so I kind of told the story that that was the way that human intelligence evolved and predicted that that might be the way that artificial intelligence evolved, that we would build machines that were sort of powerful enough, but then we'd kind of infect them with human culture. Now, the internet didn't exist then, but I wasn't quite sure where you were going to get the human culture or how you were going to do that. But I think that's sort of what's happened is what we've got is not so much artificial intelligence, but we've sort of got a substrate on which”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'll tell you a story I told a long time ago about AI, which I call the songs of Eden. Which is in some sense, it was a story about where human intelligence came from. And it was a story about a bunch of monkeys that kind of grunted and repeated each other's grunts. They sung along with each other, didn't really mean anything. But they started noticing the mood of the other monkeys by the grunts they were making. And their brains began to develop to keenly notice the moods of the other monkeys because they're social animals. And so they started evolving the ability to distinguish sounds. But at the same time, there was another kind of thing that was evolving, which there was no name for them, but we call it memes now, which is things that got repeated and that were very catchy tunes and things like that. And so there was this kind of co-evolution of these two things. One of them with the monkeys got sort of better and better at distinct.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really right about was the story of how people would relate to the machine. He had a vision about that, that other people didn't have. In some sense, it didn't matter that he was wrong about a bunch of technical things because the story was so correct. And the way that you related was so correct that all the technical things were fixable. But if you'd been wrong about the story, no amount of technical excellence would have fixed it. And I think I only understood that in retrospect after I kind of saw people relating to the Mac.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Making the Macintosh. And at the time, this was before I had been to Disney and before I learned this. And it drove me crazy because I got called in because I knew how to make chips. And Steve wanted to make a custom chip for the Macintosh initially. And it wasn't going to happen. And I was the one that had to look at it and tell him it wasn't going to happen in the timescale he wanted, which is not a fun thing to do with Steve. And so I was like, well, you know, this is just reality no matter how much you yell at me. It's not going to change. But, you know, you've got this simulator that Andy is making all his software work on. So why don't you just sell the simulator and basically blew up at me and I was missing the point of everything. But what I realized looking back at it is Steve was like really wrong about a lot of technical things. But what he was.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Care about it, but I don't necessarily talk to the clients about that. Depending on their perspective, the thing they may care about is financial sales or the reliability of the machine or the rate of production. Or they have something that they think they care about. But very often behind it, there has to be some story for it to make sense that the people who are operating the machine or buying the product. And so I'm thinking about it that way. I'm not necessarily explaining it to the client that way. But yeah, I would say pretty much everything I do is influenced by that way of looking at things and it causes you to look at the experience of it rather than the engineering of it. And actually, it's interesting. I mean, I was very lucky because I got to work with Steve Jobs when he was first making the Macintosh. And it was during that period he'd been kind of kicked out of the campus of Apple and was in an apartment with a few pirates.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So, if you did it A piece of praising paper and eat paper and take a crayon or a piece of charcoal and you rub it across. And that's nice because it's something that is you because it's like your hand marks, but it's also a unique thing of the date that you were there. So it's something that kind of could only exist because of you and because of your visit there.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would have thought about without that education at Disney. Whereas with that education, it's obvious that those things in some sense are much more important than how you solve the technical problems.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the story? So, for example, I'll give you a simple example. In the beginning, when I designed it, it was like an ordinary clock. It would always show you what time it was. Then I realized if it's ticking away in the mountain someplace and it doesn't care if you exist, then why should you care if it exists? So instead, I thought much more about the story of somebody going to visit the clock and what did they see? What's the sequence of things? Where did they get confused? Where did they get frightened of like I'm in the wrong place? And then when they get to the clock, instead of showing what time it is, it actually shows the time the last person was there. shows the time and the date that the last person was there. And then when they wind the clock, it catches up to the current time. And then, of course, this is sort of an idea that's obvious for anybody that's been at Disney, but if you want to take home a souvenir. So what it does is it has a place on the date where you can take a rubbing. And so you can go home with a rubbing of the date that you were there. Things like that I don't think I really.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or something like that. We all know that it does affect us, it does connect with us. And so, for example, the way that most obvious way that's influenced it was that's how I started to think about designing the 10,000-year clock. When I first thought about it, I was thinking about, well, mechanical problem, how do I keep it wound? How do I, you know, what materials do I use? But after a while, I came to realize that really the most important thing about this clock and the thing that will really determine how long it lasts is what do people think about it? How do they experience it? How do they relate to it?”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, when Disney designs a theme park, they don't think of it so much as a piece of architecture or a map. They think of it as a story. And by a story, it means kind of a sequence and a narrative of going into it and experiencing it. So it sort of makes sense to the people that are going through it. And they sort of know where they are. They know what to expect. They know when is over. And the ride is like that. But actually the whole theme park is like that. And that way of thinking of things as a understandable emotional experience that connects with someone is very different than sort of looking at the mechanics of how the rides work, which is also very interesting. But it's very subjective and yet it can be done well and it can be done badly. And we've all been moved by watching a film or listening to a piece of music.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, what definitely has, and I'll focus on the part of it that influenced me the most. I mean, it was really interesting to be around people who knew how to draw, and I took drawing classes and things like that. But the thing that really stuck was learning what they meant by storytelling.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I hold up mine. Everybody's like, you think it should be a bunch of boxes with lines? It was just a complete disconnect. But they knew something and they focused on different things than I did. And after a while, I came to appreciate that things, they were focusing on were extremely important. And in fact, probably the most important things to making things successful or not successful in show business. So it was a second education for me.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they said, you know, we need to make some kind of online service or Disney online. They didn't know what it was, but they knew online was a big thing. This was kind of the silly wood period when Hollywood and Silicon Valley were dancing with each other. And so they sat down and said, okay, everybody write down on a piece of paper some sketches of what you think this thing's going to look like. And so I draw the kind of block diagram of the servers and the services and the, we ought to have ways for people to log into it in a database that has a typical kind of engineering block diagram. Then everybody else at the table, we go around the table and everybody else holds up like a picture of a magic castle or, you know, it's all like images of things that you would look at, nothing about how anything would work.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of them shocked me as kind of bad because in some sense, show business is basically making stuff up, which is a nice way of saying lying about things. And it's not really tethered to reality. So, you know, in science, you have an argument somebody's right, but in show business, that's not really true. Just somebody wins the argument and you never really know who was right. So there's a completely different way people relate to each other. So basically, you know, you make a movie and there's a flop or it's a great hit. And if it's a great hit, everybody who is in the room at the time they decide to make the movie gets promoted. But, you know, nobody really knows why it was a hit or who was responsible or so on. They're very different from engineering, where there's a subground truth. Here's an example. Like one of my first days, early on they knew they needed to get an online space.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Insist on being in a meeting and everybody would be a little bit worried that maybe I had some authority and nobody would say no to me. So I learned a huge amount about kind of storytelling. And I would say the artistic way of looking at things rather than the engineering way of looking at things.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I asked for Disney Fellow, which it turns out Salvador Dolly had been the only previous Disney fellow. So I thought I was on pretty safe ground there. But also they made me a vice president just so that it turns out that's very important to a big company for some people. So they talked me into that. But it was a good thing because nobody takes you seriously unless you have some title that they understand. But it really was true that nobody knew what I was supposed to do. And actually the guy that had approved my hiring was Frank Wells. And he unfortunately died in a helicopter crash before I showed up. So really nobody knew what I was supposed to do. But that turned out to just be a fantastic way to get an education because I could say, you know, I want to be in the meeting where we decide what we're going to build in Florida that became Animal Kingdom or what we're going to build in Paris or what. So I would.”
2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT