YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeffrey Shainline

lines on the record: 208
first: 2021-09-26
most recent: 2021-09-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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

“I mean, we've talked a lot about superconducting sensors. Imagine these cognitive systems far more capable than us residing somewhere else in the solar system off of the surface of the Earth where it's much darker, much colder, much more naturally suited to them. And they have these sensors that can detect single photons of light from radio waves out to all across the spectrum to gamma rays and just see the whole universe. And they just live in space with these massive collection optics so that they what do they do? They just look out and experience that vast array of what's being developed.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, we're kind of pretty smart. I mean, talking about people like Lee Smole and Alan Gooth, Max Tegmark, okay, we're really smart talking about me. Okay, we're kind of, we can find our way to the grocery store or whatever. Sometimes, but what's next? You know, I mean, what if there's another level of hierarchy that grows on top of us that is even more profoundly capable and”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true. I think everything is transient, and that would go back to maybe something more like Lao Tzu, the Tao Tejing or something, where it's like, yes, there is nothing but change. There is nothing but emergence and dissolve. And that's it. But in this picture, this hierarchy that's developed, I don't mean to say that now it gets to us and that's the pinnacle. In fact, I think at a high level, the story I'm trying to tease out in my research is about, okay, well, so then what's the next level of hierarchy? And if, and if it's.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I don't think you have these stars, now you have solar systems on those solar systems, you have rocky worlds, you have gas giants, like all this complexity, and then you start getting life and the complexity that's evolved through the evolutionary process in life forms is just is not a letdown to me just.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's putting a characteristic time. I mean, why is 13.7 billion a long time? I mean, compared to what? I guess, so when I look at our universe, I see this extraordinary hierarchy that has developed over that time. So at the beginning, it was a chaotic mess of, you know, some plasma. nothing interesting going on there. And even for the first stars to form, that a lot of really interesting evolutionary processes had to occur by evolutionary in that sense. I just mean taking place over extended periods of time. And structures are forming then. And then it took that first generation of stars in order to produce the metals that then can more efficiently produce another generation of stars. We're only the third generation of stars. So we might still be pretty quick to the game here.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I usually think of you as one who celebrates humanity in all its forms and things like that. And I guess I just, I don't see it the way you just described. I mean, okay, we've been here for 13.7 billion years and you're saying, gosh, that's a long time. Let's get on with the show already. Some other universe could have kicked our butt by now.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I buy that. I think that is rare. So if you say how much life is in our galaxy, I think that's probably the right answer is that microbes are everywhere. Cambrian explosion is extremely rare. And then, but the Cambrian explosion kind of went like that, where within a couple tens or hundred million years, all of these body plans came into existence. And basically all of the body plans that are now in existence on the planet were formed in that brief window. We've just been shuffling around since then. So then what caused humans to pop out of that? I mean, that could be another extremely rare threshold that a planet roughly in the habitable zone with water is not guaranteed to cross.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Parameters that allow even microbial life to form are not just a fluke. But anyway, that aside, yes, then there was this long dormant period, not dormant, things were happening, but important things were happening for some two and a half billion years or something after the metabolic process that releases oxygen was developed, then basically the planet is just sitting there getting more and more oxygenated, more and more oxygenated until it's enough that you can build these large complex organisms. And so the rare earth hypothesis would argue that The microbes are common in everywhere in any planet that's like roughly in the habitable zone and has some water on it is probably going to have those. But then getting to this Cambrian explosion that happened some between five and six hundred million years ago, that's rare, you know?”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we just don't have enough data to really say. But I find this whole subject extremely engaging. I mean, there's this concept, I think it's called the rare earth hypothesis, which is that basically stating that, okay, microbes were here right away after the Haitian era where we were being bombarded. Well, after, yeah, bombarded by comets, asteroids, things like that, and also after the moon formed. So once things settled down a little bit in a few hundred million years, you have microbes everywhere. And it could have been, we don't know exactly when it could have been remarkably brief that that took. So it does indicate that, okay, life forms relatively easily. I think that alone is sort of a checker on the scale for the argument that”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One to a hundred or something. But okay, now it's really important to put a time window on that, I think, because does that mean in the entire lifetime of the galaxy before it... So, for in our case, before we run into Andromeda I think it's highly probable, I shouldn't say I think it's tempting to believe that it's highly probable that in that entire lifetime of your galaxy, you're going to get at least one intelligent species, maybe thousands or something like that. But it's also, I think, Little bit naive to think that they're going to coincide in time and we'll be able to observe them.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could, but I guess if you want me to put my chips on the table or whatever, I think I come down more on the side that intelligent life, civilizations are rare. And I guess I follow Max Tegmark here. And also there's a lot of papers coming out recently in the field of astrobiology that are seeming to say, all right, you just work through the numbers on some modified Drake equation or something like that. And it looks like it's not improbable you wouldn't be surprised that an intelligent species has arisen in our galaxy. But if you think there's one, the next solar system over, it's highly improbable. So I can see that the number, the probability of finding a civilization in a galaxy, maybe it's most likely that you're going to find...”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adjusted the parameters would need to be in order for silicon to have the properties it does. Okay, this is not directly speaking to what you're saying. You're getting to the Fermi paradox, which is where are they? Where are the lifeforms out there? How numerous are they? That sort of thing. What I'm trying to argue is that If this framework is on the right track, a potentially correct explanation for our existence, it doesn't necessarily predict that intelligent civilizations are just everywhere because even if you just get one of them in a galaxy, which is quite rare, Could be enough dramatically increase the fecundity of the universe as a whole.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And see how changing the parameters makes it more or less likely that stars would form and have long lifetimes or that rocky planets in the habital zone are likely to form, all these different things. So we can test how much these things are in a tug of war with each other. And the prediction would be that we kind of sit at this central point where if you move the parameters too much, stars aren't stable or life doesn't form or technologies infeasible because life alone, at least the kind of life that we know of, cannot make black holes. We don't have this, well, I'm speaking for myself. You're a very fit strong person, but it might be possible for you, but not for me to compress matter. So we need these technologies, but we don't know, we have not been able to quantify yet how finally”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things that I try to emphasize in that paper is that given this idea of how our parameters might have been selected, it's clear that it's a series of trade-offs, right? If you make, I mean, in order for intelligent life of our variety or anything resembling us to occur, you need a bunch of stuff. You need stars. So that's right back to Smolin's roots of this idea, but you also need water to have certain properties. You need things like the rocky planets like the Earth to be within the habitable zone, all these things that you start talking about in the field of astrobiology, trying to understand life in the universe, but you can't overemphasize, you can't tune the parameters so precisely to maximize the number of stars or to give water.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the hypothesis that I just described is on the right track. It would mean that the parameters of our universe have been selected so that intelligent civilizations will occur in sufficient numbers so that if they reach something like supreme technological maturity, let's define that as the ability to produce black holes, then that's not a highly improbable event. It doesn't need to happen often because as I just described, if you get one of them in a galaxy, you're going to make more black holes than the stars in that galaxy. But there's also not a super strong motivation. Well, Not obvious that you need them to be ubiquitous throughout the galaxy”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Necessarily gravity. So stars make black holes with gravity, but any force that can make the energy density can compactify matter to produce a great enough energy density can form a singularity. It would not likely be gravity. It's the weakest force. You're more likely to use something like the technologies that we're developing for fusion, for example. So I don't know the large ignition facility recently blasted a pellet with a hundred really bright lasers and caused that to get dense enough to engage in nuclear fusion. So something more like that or a toka mac with a really hot plasma. I'm not sure something. I don't know exactly how it would be done.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Black holes outpacing the star production rate by some three orders of magnitude. That's one asteroid. So now if you envision an intelligent species that would potentially have been devised initially by humans, but then based on superconducting optal electronic networks, no doubt, and they go out and populate, they don't have to fill the galaxy. They just have to get out to the asteroid belt. Could potentially dramatically outpace the rate at which stars are producing offspring universes. And then wouldn't you expect that that's where we came from instead of a star?”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All that kind of stuff. And so if you do a simple calculation that says, all right, if I want to, we know roughly how many core collapse supernovae have resulted in black holes in our galaxy since the beginning of the universe. And it's something like a billion. So then you would have to estimate that it would be possible for a technological civilization to produce more than a billion black holes with the energy and matter at their disposal. And so one of the calculations in that paper, back of the envelope, but I think revealing nonetheless is that if you take a relatively common asteroid, something that's about a kilometer in diameter, what I'm thinking of is just scrap material laying around in our solar system and break it up into 10 kilogram chunks and turn each of those into a universe, then you would have made at least A trillion”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What might have happened is that, okay, this particular branch on the vast tree of evolution, cosmological evolution now we're talking about, not biological evolution within our universe, but cosmological evolution went through exactly the process that Lee Smolin described, got to the stage where stars were making lots of black holes, but then continued to evolve and somehow bridge that gap and made intelligence and intelligence capable of devising technologies because technologies intelligent species working in conjunction with technologies could then produce even more efficient.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turns out that if you can compress about 10 kilograms into a very small volume, that will make a black hole that is likely highly probable to inflate into its own offspring universe. This is according to calculations done by other people who are professional quantum theorists, quantum field theorists. And I hope I am grasping what they're telling me correctly. I'm somewhat of a translator here. But so that's the position that is particularly intriguing to me, which is that.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This whole big process exactly. So if what you are truly, if your entire evolutionary process only cares about fecundity, it only cares about making offspring universes because then there's going to be the most of them in that local region of hyperspace, which is the set of all possible universes, let's say. You don't care how those universes are made. You know they have to be made by black holes. This is what inflationary theory tells us. The Big Bang tells us that black holes make universes. But what if there was a technological means to make universes? Stars require a ton of matter because they're not thinking very carefully about how you make a black hole. They're just using gravity, you know. But if we devise technologies that can efficiently compress matter into a singularity, it turns out.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cosmological natural selection could lead to a universe with rich structure and he argued that the structure, the physics of our universe is designed to make a lot of stars so that they can make black holes. But that doesn't explain what we're doing here. In order for that to be an explanation of us, what you have to assume is that once you made that universe that was capable of producing stars, life, planets, all these other things were along for the ride. They got lucky. We're kind of arising growing up in the cracks, but the universe isn't here for us. We're still kind of a fluke in that picture. And I can't, I don't necessarily have a philosophical opposition to that stance. It's just not, okay, so I don't think it's complete.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's not get too far because I want to emphasize something that what you're saying is, isn't it fascinating that the universe evolved something that can be conscious, reflect on itself? Lee Smolen's idea didn't take us there. Remember, it took us to stars. Lee Smolin has argued. I think right on almost every single way that”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're pretty close. I don't know. I mean, I'm spending my career designing things that I hope we'll think about themselves so that you and I aren't too far apart on that one.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, at a certain point, and then you're screwed. And when you're wearing shoes and you can't even get down to your toes, it's like.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I suspect it is exactly infinite. I mean, I just can't understand how. With this idea, you can never draw a boundary around and say, no, the universe, I mean, the multiverse has 10 to the one quadrillion components, but not infinity. I don't know.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like the biological evolutionary process that has occurred within our universe is not a unique route toward achieving one specific chosen kind of species. No, we have extraordinary diversity around us. That's what evolution does.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know that there are these fluctuations that are occurring. What Smolin is arguing is that there is this extensive multiverse, that this universe, what we can measure and interact with, is not unique in nature. It's just our residence. It's where we reside. And there are countless potentially infinity other universes, other entire evolutionary trajectories that have evolved into things like what you were mentioning a second ago with different parameters and different ways of achieving complexity and reproduction and all that stuff. So it's not that the evolutionary process Is a funnel towards this endpoint. Not at all.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, okay. So before getting into where I'd like to take that idea, let me just a little bit more groundwork. There is this concept of the multiverse and it can be confusing. Different people use the word multiverse in different ways. In the multiverse that I think is relevant to picture when trying to grasp Lee Smolin's idea, essentially every vacuum fluctuation can be referred to as a universe. It occurs. It borrows energy from the vacuum for some finite amount of time and it evanesces back into the quantum vacuum. And ideas of Guth before that and Andre Linde with eternal inflation aren't that different that you would expect nature due to the quantum properties of the vacuum, which we know exist. They're measurable through things like the Casmere effect and others.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stars make black holes, therefore, we should expect our universe to be optimized, have its physical parameters optimized to make very large numbers of stars, because that's how you make black holes, and black holes make offspring. So we expect the physics of our universe to have evolved to maximize fecundity, the number of offspring, and the way Lee Smolin argues you do that is through stars that the biggest ones die in these core collapse supernova that make a black hole and a child.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So, what Smolin said is our universe results from an evolutionary process that can be traced back some, he estimated 200 million generations. Through random chance, a universe that was able to reproduce just once. So now it had one offspring. And then over time, it was able to make more and more until it evolved into a highly structured universe with a very long lifetime with a great deal of complexity and importantly, especially importantly for Lee Smolin stars.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A black hole in one universe is a big bang in another universe. And this allows us to have progeny, offspring. So a universe can be said to have come before another universe. And very crucially, Smolen argues, I think this is potentially one of the great ideas of all time. That's my opinion, that when a black hole forms, it's not a classical entity, it's a quantum gravitational entity. So it is subject to the fluctuations that are inherent in quantum mechanics. The properties that what we're calling the parameters that describe the physics of that system are subject to slight mutations so that the offspring universe does not have the exact same parameters defining its physics as its parent universe. They're close, but they're a little bit different. And so now you have a mechanism for Evolution for natural selection.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a paper, I believe it was 1986 with Alan Guth and another author Farhe, they wrote that a Big Bang, I don't remember the exact quote, a Big Bang is inextricably linked with a black hole. The singularity that we call our origin is mathematically indistinguishable from a black hole. They're the same thing. And Lee Smolin based his thinking on that idea, I believe. I don't mean to speak for him, but this is my reading of it. So what Lee Smolin will say is that”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Singularity begins this process of growth, there can be a temporary stage where it just accelerates incredibly rapidly. And based on quantum field theory, this tells us that this should produce matter in precisely the proportions that we find of hydrogen and helium in the Big Bang, lithium also, and other things too. So the predictions that come out of Big Bang inflationary cosmology have stood up extremely well to empirical verification, the cosmic microwave background, things like this. So most scientists working in the field think that the origin of our universe is the Big Bang. And I base all my thinking on that as well. I'm just laying this out there so that people understand that where I'm coming from is An extension, not a replacement of existing well-founded ideas.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How the universe got here, our role in it, what technology is doing here. But there's a couple more pieces that need to be set up first. So the beginning of our universe is largely accepted to be the big bang. And what that means is if you look back in time by looking far away in space, you see that everything used to be at one point and it expanded away from there was an era in the evolutionary process of our universe that was called inflation and this idea was developed primarily by Alan Guthen and others, Andre Linde and others in the 80s. And this idea of inflation is basically that when”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist who back in the late 1980s published a paper in the early 1990s, introduced this idea of cosmological natural selection, which argues that The universe did evolve. So his paper was called Did the Universe Evolve? And I gave myself the liberty of titling my paper Cosmological Selection Select for Technology in reference to that. So he introduced that idea decades ago. Now he primarily works on quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity, other approaches to unifying quantum mechanics with general relativity as you can read about in his most recent book, I believe, and he's been on your show as well. But I want to introduce this idea of cosmological natural selection because I think that is one of the core ideas that could change our understanding of”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good thing to discuss. I guess I feel like we need to lay a little bit more groundwork. So I want to make sure that I introduced this in the context of Lee Smolin's previous idea.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, you can start to quantify things. You're exactly right. So nowhere am I arguing that in all of the vast parameter space of everything that could conceivably exist in the multiverse of nature, there is this one point in parameter space where complexity arises. I doubt it. That would be... Shameful waste of resources But it might be that we reside at one place in parameter space that has been adapted through an evolutionary process to allow us to make certain technologies that allow our particular kind of universe to arise and sort of achieve the things it does.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I started working more with technology, getting into the more recent years of my career, particularly when I started after having worked with silicon for a long time, which was kind of eerie on its own. But then when I switched over to superconductor, I was just like, this is crazy. It's just absolutely astonishing that our universe gives us superconductivity. It's one of the most beautiful physical phenomena and it's also extraordinarily useful for technology. So you can argue that the universe has to have the parameters it does for us to exist because we couldn't be here otherwise. But why does it give us technology? Why does it give us silicon that has this ideal oxide that allows us to make a transistor without trying that hard? That can't be explained by the same anthropic reasoning.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was dialed in. It's arguable how precisely they have to be dialed in, but dialed in to some extent, not just in order to enable our existence, that's a very anthropocentric view, but to enable a universe like this one. So, okay, maybe I think the majority position of working physicists in the field is it has to be that way in order for us to exist. We're here. We shouldn't be surprised that that's the way the universe is. And I don't know, for a while that never sat well with me, but I just kind of moved on because there are things to do and a lot of exciting work doesn't depend on resolving this puzzle.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of the strength of different couplings. How strongly does a charged particle couple to the electromagnetic field or masses? How strongly does a particle couple to the Higgs field or something like that? And those parameters that define not the general structure of the equations, but the relative importance of different terms, they seem to be every bit as important as the structure of the equations themselves. And so I forget who it was. Somebody when they were working through this and trying to see, okay, if I adjust the parameter, this parameter over here, call it the, say, the fine structure constant, which tells us the strength of the electromagnetic interaction. Oh, boy, I can't change it very much. Otherwise, nothing works. The universe sort of doesn't, it just pops into existence and goes away in a nanosecond or something like that. And somebody had the phrase, this looks like a put-up job, meaning every one of these...”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all well adjusted to allow a universe like we see very complex, this large, long-lived universe. And so one answer to that is, well, of course it is because we wouldn't be here otherwise. But I don't know, that's not very satisfying. That's what's known as the weak anthropic principle. It's a statement of selection bias. We can only observe a universe that is fit for us to live in. So what does it mean for a universe to be fit for us to live in? Well, the pursuit of physics, it is based partially on coming up with equations that describe how things behave and interact with each other. But in all those equations, you have, so there's the form of the equation, sort of how different fields or particles move in space and time. But then there are also the parameters that just tell you”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think you've introduced it nicely. Let me just try to say a few things in my language. Layout, what is this fine-tuning problem? Physicists have spent centuries trying to understand the system of equations that govern the way nature behaves, the way particles move and interact with each other. And as that understanding has become more clear over time, it became sort of evident that”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mathematicians hate it too. But I think it was Turing who said something along the lines of. I can give you an intelligence system, or I can give you a flawless system, but I can't give you both. And it's in sort of creativity and abstract thinking seem to rely somewhat on. Stochasticity and not having components that perform exactly the same way every time.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In every single automobile with so much on the line, you have to be able to trust that. So now how do we know that we can trust that? How do we know that we can trust the self-driving car or the supercomputer that trained it? There's a lot of work there and there's a lot of that going on at NIST. And it's still early days. I mean, you're familiar with the problem and all that.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Massive data acquisition, massive data integration, I would think that that's where large scale spiking neural networks with vast communication and all these things would have something pretty tremendous to offer. It's not going to happen tomorrow. There's a lot of development that needs to be done. But, you know, we have to be patient with self-driving cars for a lot of reasons. We were all optimistic that they would be here by now. And okay, they are to some extent, but if we're thinking five or ten years down the line, it's not unreasonable. One other thing I'll just let me just mention getting into self-driving cars and technologies that are Much larger effort in AI at NIST than my little project. And really central to that mission is this concept of trustworthiness. So, when you're going to deploy this neural network,”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But also based on an extraordinary amount of diverse input. And that's one of the things. So, this does seem like one of those spaces where the scale of superconducting optoelectronics, the way that so when you talk about the weaknesses, like I said, okay, well, you have to cool it down. At this scale, that's fine. Because that's not too much of an added cost. Most of your power is being dissipated by the circuits themselves, not the cooling. And also you have one centralized kind of cognitive hub, if you will. And so if we're talking about putting a superconducting system in a car, that's questionable. Do you really want to cryostat in the trunk of everyone in your cart? It'll fit. It's not that big of a deal, but hopefully there's a better way, right? But since this is sort of a central supreme intelligence or something like that, and it's it needs to really have this.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right, right. Yeah. So I guess let me just try to understand is the point of this dojo system to figure out the parameters that then plug into neural networks and then you don't need to retrain you. You just make copies of a certain chip that has all the all the parameters established or”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're exactly right. Sometimes just having that focus on that application brings a lot of people focuses their energy and attention. I think that so one of the things that's appealing about what you're saying is not just that the application is specific, but also that the scale is big and that the benefit is.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I mean, okay, tomorrow, no. In the long term, it could be the whole thing. It could be nothing. I don't know, but definitely, definitely. When you look at the, so I don't know that much about Dojo. My understanding is that that's new, right? That's just coming online.”
2021-09-26 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #225 – Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source