YouSaid · the spoken record

Lee Cronin

lines on the record: 276
first: 2022-03-11
most recent: 2022-03-11
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

“Do that. Let's imagine what happened. Go back to a really tragic accident a few years ago, well, not an accident, an act of murder by that pilot on the, I think it was Eurowings or Swiss wings. But what he did is plane took off. He waited till his pilot went to the toilet. He was a co-pilot. He locked the door and then set the autopilot above the Alps. So he set the altimeter or the descend height to zero. So the computer just took the plane into the Alps.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing is when drugs, so right now I think it is absolutely outrageous that not all of humanity has access to medicine. And I think the computer might be able to change that fundamentally because it will disrupt the way things are manufactured. So let's stop thinking about manufacturing in different factories. Let's say that computers, clinical grade computers or drug grade computers will be in facilities all around the world and they can make things on demand as a function of the cost. Maybe people won't be able to afford the latest and greatest patent, but maybe they'll be able to get the next best thing and we'll basically democratize and make available drugs to everybody that they need. There's lots of really interesting things there. So I think that's going to happen. I think that now let's take the negative before we...”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the personalization, the cost of drugs right now, we're all living longer. We're all having more and more, we know more about our genomic development. We know about our predetermination. And we might be able to, one dream I've got is like imagine you can work at your genome assistant tells you you're going to get cancer in seven years' time. And you have your personal computer that cooks up the right molecule just for you to cure it, right? That's a really positive idea.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a really good question. So there's so many positive things from drug discovery, from supply chain stress for basically enabling chemists to basically build more productive in the lab, right? The computer is not going to replace the chemist. There's going to be a Moore's law of molecules, right? There's going to be so many more molecules we can design, so many more diseases we can cure.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's reassuring. And so we're in the middle of it. It's really exciting. It's not the be all and the end all, and there is, like I say, errors that can creep in. One day we might be able to do it without human interaction, you simulate it, and you'll know enough about the simulation that the lab won't catch fire. But there are so many safety issues right now that we've got to really be very careful. protecting the user, protecting the environment, protecting misuse. I mean, there's lots to discuss if you want to go down that route because it's very, very interesting. You don't want Novachok's being made or explosives being made or recreational drugs being made but how do you stop a molecular biologist making a drug that's going to be important for them looking at their particular assay and a bad actor trying to make methamphetamine.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just hacking around, right? And I wonder if chemists in the future will learn to do chemistry by just hacking around with the system and writing different things. Because the key thing that we're doing with the chemistry is that where a lot of mathematical chemistry went wrong is people, and I think Wolfram does this in mathematica, he assumes that chemistry is a reaction where atom A or molecule A reacts with molecule B to give molecule C. That's not what chemistry is. Chemistry is take some molecule take a liquid and a solid mix it up and heat it. And then extract it. So the programming language is actually with respect to the process operations. If you flick in process space, not in chemical graph space, you unlock everything because there's only a finite number of processes you need to do in chemistry.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say that's right. And it's really important to understand those labeling schemes, right? And one of the things I was always worried about the beginning that the abstraction was going to fall over. And the way we did it was just by brute force to start with. We just kept reading the literature and saying, is there anything new? Can we add a new rule in? And actually our KDL language expand exploded. There were so many extra things we had to keep adding. And then I realized the primitives still were maintained and I could break them down again. So it's pretty good. I mean, there are problems. There are problems of, you know, interpreting any big sentence and turning it into an actionable code. And the codex is not without its problems. You can crash it quite easily, right? You can generate nonsense. But boy, it's interesting. I would love to learn to program now using codecs.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The chemics does in this case is it just it suggests the first go and then the chemist goes in and corrects it and I really want the chemist to correct it because it's not safe I believe to allow AI to just read literature and generate code at this stage.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pipeline is that the software, the model gets confused between some meanings, right? So if chemists are very good at inventing words that aren't broken down, so the classic word that you would use for boiling something is called reflux. So reflux is you would have a solvent in a round bottom flask. At reflux, it would be boiling, going up the reflux condenser and coming down. But that term reflux to reflux could be changed to people often make upwards, new words. And then the software can fall over. But what we've been able to do is a bit like in Python or any programming language is identify when things aren't matched. So you present the code and you say, this isn't matched. You may want to think about this. And then the user goes and says, oh, I mean reflux and just ticks the box and collects it. So what the codex...”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, right now, a lot of people doing machine learning and reading chemistry and saying, oh, you've got all these operations, add, shake, whatever heat. But because they don't have a uniform... I mean, there's a couple of groups doing it, competitors actually. They're good, very good, but they can't run that code automatically. They are losing meaning. And the really important thing that you have to do is generate context. And so what we've learned to do with our abstraction is make sure we can pull the context out of the text. And so can we take a chemical procedure and read it and generate our executable code? Yes.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, there's actually software out there right now. You can go and do it. Yeah, it's a heuristic, it's rule based, but we have what we've done inspired by a codex actually is over the summer I ran a little workshop. Some of my groups got this inspired idea that we should get a load of students and ask them to manually collect data to label chemical procedures into KidL. And we have called Synth Reader. So there's a bunch of people doing this right now, but they're doing it without abstraction. And because we have an abstraction that's implementable in the hardware, we've developed basically a chemical analog of codecs.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what it now does is it says, okay, the problem we have before is it was possible to do robotics for chemistry, but the robots were really expensive. They were unique. They were vendor locked. And what I want to do is to make sure that every chemist in the world can get access to machinery like this at virtually no cost because it makes it safer. It makes it more reliable. And then if you go to the literature and you find a molecule that could potentially cure cancer. And let's say the molecule that could potentially cure cancer takes you three years to repeat. And maybe a student finishes their PhD in the time and they never get it back. So it's really hard to kind of get all the way to that molecule and it limits the ability of humanity to build on it. If they just download the code and can execute it, it turns, I would say, the electronic laboratory notebook in chemistry is a data.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it does is like the graph is equivalent to the process of firmware, the processor code. So when you take your Kidel and you go to run it on your computer, you can run it on any compatible hardware and any configuration. It says, what does your graph look like? As long as I can solve the problem on the graph with these unit operations, you have the resources available at compile chemes. We can carry on for years. But it is really. It's compilation.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a Turing complete language, really. But so what it has, it has a series of operators in it, like add, heat, stir. So there's a bunch of just unit operations. And all it is really is just with chemical engineers when I talked about this, that you've just rediscovered chemical engineering. And I said, well, yeah, I know. I said, well, that's trivial. I said, well, not really. Well, yes, it is trivial. And that's why it's good because not only have we rediscovered chemical engineering, we've made it implementable on universal hardware that doesn't cost very much money. And so the KIDL has a series of statements like define the reactor. So defines the reagents. So they're all labels. So you assign them. And what I also implemented at the beginning is because I give all the hardware IP address, you put it on a graph.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“XDL, but all we use, we put in Kai, and it was named by one of my students, and I, one of my postdocs many years ago, and I kind liked it. It's like It's important, I think, when the team are contributing to such big ideas, because they're ideas as well. I try not to just rename, I didn't call it Cronin or anything that, because they keep saying, you know, is the chemistry, when they're putting stuff in the computer, one of my students said, we are asking now, is it Cronin complete? And I was like, what does that mean? I said, well, can we make it on the damn machine? And I was like, oh, is that a compliment or a majority? And they're like, well, it might be both.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now we also, the chemist doesn't need to program in Kidl. They can just go to the software and type in add A to B, reflux, do what they would normally do, and it just converts it to Kidel and they have a linter to check it in error correct.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Kidie L is the name of the programming language and the code we give the chemicals. So Kai, as in XML format, but I've now taken it from script to a fully expressible programming language so we can do dynamics and there's for loops in there and conditional statements.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And not only that, we can protect the Kaidel so we can stop bad actors doing it. We can encrypt them. And we can give people licenses.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only have 20 million molecules, well, say 20 million molecules in one database, maybe a few hundred million in all the pharmaceutical companies. And those few hundred million molecules are responsible for all the drugs that we've had by humanity, except biologics for the last 50 years. Now imagine what happens when a drug goes out of print, goes out of print because there's only a finite number of manufacturing facilities in the world that make these drugs.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's getting more reliable because I made some, we just made design decisions and said we are not going to abandon the abstraction. Think about it. The von Neumann implementation was abandoned. I mean, think about what we do to semiconductors to really constrain them to what we do to silicon in a fab lab. We take computation for granted. Silicon is not in its natural state. We are doping the hell out of it.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It did seem really difficult, and I do keep pinching myself when I go in the lab. I was like, Is it working? Like, yep. And it's not, you know, it does clog. It does stop.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we've got the, and have we got the equivalent of the Aniac in my lab? We've got 15 computers in the lab now. Are they unreliable? Yeah, they fall apart here and there, but are they getting better really quickly? Yeah. Are they now able to reliably make, are we at the point in the lab where there are some molecules, we would rather make on the computer than have a human being make? Yeah, we've just done, we've just made a anti-influenza molecule and some antivirals, six steps on a computer that would take a human being about one week to make arbitrary continuous labor. And all they do now is load up the reagents, press go button and just go away and drink coffee.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes and no. Right. Is there messiness? There is messiness because chemistry is like you're doing reactions on billions of molecules and they don't always work. But you've got purification there. And so what we've found is at the beginning everyone said it can't work. It's going to be too messy. It will just fail. And I said, but you managed to get chemistry to work in the lab. Are you magic? Are you doing something? So I would say now go back to the first ever computer or the ENIAC five million soldered joints, four hundred thousand valves exploding all the time. Would you have gone, okay, that's messy?”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't call it a 3D printer, I would call it a universal chemical reaction system because 3D printing gives the wrong impression. But yeah, and it purifies. And the nice thing is that that code now, we call it the KDL code is really interesting because now computation, what is computation? Computation is what computing is to mathematics, I think. Computation is the process of taking chemical code and some input reagents and making the same molecule, making the molecule reproducibly every time without fail. What is computation? It's the process of using a program to take some input conditions and give you an output. Same every time, right? Reliably.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we can use that language reading to populate the state machine and basically add, subtract, we got about a number of primitives that basically program loops that we dovetail together and we can make any molecule with it.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then in the next one, what we did said, okay, my poor organic chemist said, Look, Lee, we've worked with you this long. We've made a robot that looks like it's going to take our jobs away and not just take our jobs away, what we love in the lab, but now we have to become programmers. But we're not even good programmers. We just have to spend ages writing lines of code that are boring and it's not as elegant. And went, you're right. So then, but I knew because I had this abstraction and I knew that there was language, I could suddenly develop a state machine that would interpret the language which was lossy and ambiguous and populate my abstraction. So I built a chemical programming language that is actually going to be recursively enumerable. It's going to be a Turing complete language, which is kind of cool, which means it's formula verifiable. So where we are now is we can now read the literature using a bit of natural language processing. It's not the best. Many other groups have done better jobs.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turn it up from one state to another state, stop it, and just read it out. And okay, and I was kind of bitching at electrical engineering saying you have it easy, you don't have to clean out the electrons. Electrons don't leave a big mess. They leave some EM waste. But in my state machine, I built in cleaning. So it's like we do an operation. Then it cleans the backbone, then can do it again. So there's no So, what we managed to do over a couple of years is develop the hardware, develop a state machine, and we encoded three molecules. We did the first three, we did nitol, a sleeping drug, rafinamide, anesthesia, and Viagra. And I could make jokes on the paper. It's a hard problem, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And theta. Plug them all in. Plug them all into a router. And then I made the state machine. And there was a couple of cool things I did. Oh, they did, actually. We got the abstraction, so reaction workup separation purification. And then I made the decision to do it in batch. Now it's in batch. All chemistry had been digitized before, apparently, once it's been done. But everyone's been doing it in flow. And flow is continuous. And there are infinities everywhere. And you have to just, and I realized that I could actually make a state machine where I basically put stuff in, the reactor.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I was like, that'll be because they've got G code to do it all. I was like, that's cool. So I got my group doing this and I developed it a bit and I realized that we could take those unit operations and we built a whole bunch of pumps and valves and I realized that I could basically take the literature and I made the first version of the computer in 2016-17 I made some architectural decisions so I designed the pumps and valves in my group. I did all the electronics in my group. They were brilliant. I cannot pay tribute to my group enough in doing this. They were just brilliant. And there were some poor souls there that said Lee, why are you making this design electronics? I'm like, well, because I don't understand it. So you're making his design stuff because you don't understand. It's like, yeah. It's like, but can we not just buy some? I said, well, we can, but then I don't understand how to, you know, what bus they're going to use and the serial ports and all this stuff. I just wanted, and I made, I came up with a decision to design a bunch of pumps and valves and use power over Ethernet. So they got one cable for power.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I got from, they were a bit confused because I was calling them idiots and then called them geniuses. It's like, will you come to my lab and we're going to build a robot to do chemistry with a 3D printer? And I said, oh, that's cool. All right. So I had them come to the lab and we started to 3D print test tube. So imagine 3D print a bottle. And then use the same gantry to basically rather than to squirt out plastic out of a nozzle, have a little syringe and chemicals in. So we had the 3D print that could simultaneously print the test tube and then put chemicals into the test tube.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that hard? I said, but just in principle, and I got a few very enlightened people to say, yeah, okay, in principle, but it ain't going to work. And this was in about 2013, 2014. And I found myself going to an architecture conference almost by accident. It's like, why am I at this random conference on architecture? And that was because I published a paper on inorganic architecture. And they said, come to an architecture conference. But the inorganic architecture, nano architecture. And I went, okay. And then I found these guys at the conference 3D printing ping pong balls and shapes. And this is, 3D printing was cool. And I was like, this is ridiculous. Why are you 3D printing ping pong balls? And I gave them a whole load of abuse like I normally do when I first meet people, how to win friends and influence people. And then I was like, oh my God, you guys are geniuses.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about that for a second, okay? Great. How do we then implement it? And I think to make any molecule, you have to do a reaction. So you have to put reagents together, do a reaction in a flask, typically. Then after the reaction, you have to stop the reactions. You do what's called a workup. So whatever, call it down, add some liquid to it, extract. So then after you do the workup, you separate. So you then remove the molecules, separate them all out. And then the final step is purification. So reaction at workup, separate, purify. So this is basically like a Turing machine where you have your tape, you have your tape head, you have some rules, and then you run it. So I thought, cool. I went to all the chemists and said, look, chemistry isn't that hard. Reaction, workup, separation, purification. Do that in cycles forever for any molecule, all the chemistry. Done. And they said, chemistry.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so what I did is I said, look, to make a molecule, you need to do four things abstractly. I want to make a chemical Turing machine. Because a Turing machine, you think about this, imagine a Turing machine. Turing machine is the ultimate abstraction of a computation because it's been shown by Turing and others that basically a universal Turing machine should be able to do all computations that you can imagine. It's like, wow, why don't I think of a Turing machine for chemistry? Let's think of a magic robot that can make any molecule.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As if I was insane and basically kicked me out of the lab and said, No, don't do that. We're not doing that. And I said, okay, so I went back the next day and said, I'm going to find some money so we can make cool robots do chemical reactions. Everyone went, That's cool. And so, in that process”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but let's go back. So, the basic thesis is chemistry is very analog. There is no state machine. And I wandered into the paper walls in the Japanese house a few years ago and said, okay, hey organic chemist, why are you doing this analog? They said, well, chemistry is really hard. You can't automate it. It's impossible. I said, but is it impossible? He says, yeah. And they said, you know, I got the impression they were saying it's magic. And so when people tell me things are magic, it's like, no, no, they can't be magic. Right. So let's break this down. And so what I did is I went to my group one day about eight years ago and said, hey guys, I've written this new programming language for you. And so everything is clear. And, you know, you have to, you're not allowed to just wander around the lab willy-nilly. You have to pick up things in order, go to the balance of the right time and all this stuff. And they looked at me.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I get in trouble saying this. I said to my group, I shouldn't say it because I said, look, we should make the crackbot in the crack robot, the mix crack.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, computation is not a chemical computer because we talked a few moments about actually doing computations for chemicals. What I'm now saying is I want to use state machines to transform chemicals. And so”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between states Because precise how you do those transitions. You can mathematically precisely describe a state machine. A very simple Boolean gates are a very good way of building kind of logic-based state machines. Obviously, a Turing machine, the concept of a Turing machine where you have a tape and a reed head and a series of rules in a table and you would basically look at what's on the tape. And if you're shifting the tape from left to right and if you see a zero or one, you look and your lookup table and say, right, I've seen a zero and a one. I then do respond to that. So in the turnstile would be, is there a human being pushing the turnstile in direction clockwise? If yes, I will open, let them go. If it's anti-clockwise, no. So, yeah, so a state machine has some labels and a transition diagram.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a state machine is, I suppose, an object, either abstract or mechanical, where you can do a unit operation on it and flick it from one state to another. So turnstile would be a good example of a state machine.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so computation is a name I gave to the process of building a state machine to make any molecule physically in the lab. And so as a chemist, chemists make molecules by hand. And chemists have a lot of tacit knowledge, a lot of ambiguity. It's not possible to go uniformly to literature and read a recipe to make a... Then go and make it in the lab every time. Some recipes are better than others, but they all assume some real. Knowledge, and it's not universal what that is.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it's both memory. I still had to go through a lot of pain to get low memory. So I say that physics and chemistry and biology are the same discipline. They're just physics, laws in physics. There's no such thing as a law in physics. It's just low memory stuff. Because you've got low memory stuff, things reoccur quickly. As you get building more memory, you get to chemistry, so things become more contingent. When you get to biology, more contingent still, and then technology. So the more memory you need, the more your laws are local. That's all I'm saying. The less memory, the more the laws are universal because they're not laws. They are just low memory states.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it enhances it. That equation is a minimal compressed representation of reality, right? We can use machine learning or Max Tegmark's AI Feiman to find lots of solutions for gravity. But isn't it wonderful that the laws that we do find are the maximally compressed representations?”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree, but coming back to von Neumann and Feynman and Wolfram, their minds, the non-trivial minds, to create those architectures and do it and to put on those state transitions. And I think that something that's really incredibly interesting that is understanding how the human mind builds those state transition machines.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's all I wanted to say. I agree with you with a wonder of CAs. I just think, but remember we take so much for granted what the CA is resting on. Because von Neumann and Feynman weren't seeing these elaborate structures. They could not get that far.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not against. I mean, I'm in love with CAs as well. I'm just saying. They aren't as trivial as people think. They are incredible. We get to that richness. You have to iterate billions of times. You need a display, and you need a Mathco processor, and you need a von Neumann machine based on a Turing machine with digital error correction and states.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm saying that the operating system that a CA has to exist on is quite complex. And so I wonder if you're getting the complexity out of the CA from the boundary conditions, the operating system, the underlying digital computer.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, people were using CAs as models for things in reality to say, hey, look, you can do this thing in a CA. And when I see this, I'm saying, oh, that's cool. But what does that tell me about reality? Where's the CA in space timetable?”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I mean, sorry, let's go back. So, as a physical phenomena, do CAs exist in physical reality, right? I would say they probably don't exist outside the human mind, but now of constructed them, they exist in computer memories. They exist in my lab. They exist on paper. So they emerge from the human mind. I'm just interested in, because Stephen Wolfram likes CAs, a lot of people like CAs and likes to think of them as minimal computational elements. I'm just saying, well, do they exist in reality or are they a representation of a simple machine that's just very elegant to implement?”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So I was playing around with this, and I was kind of annoying some of my colleagues. I'm wondering if we could get to chemical supremacy, like quantum supremacy. And I kind of calculated how big the grid has to be so we can actually start to solve problems faster than the silicon computer. But I'm not willing to state how that is yet because I'm probably wrong. It's not that it's any top secret thing. I think I can make a chemical computer that can solve optimization problems faster than silicon computer.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there something you can do? Maybe. I'm not sure. I think we can come up with a way of solving problems, also really complex hard ones, because it's an analog computer. And it can energy minimize really quickly. It doesn't have to basically go through every element in the matrix and flip it. It just reads out. So we can actually do Monte Carlo by just shaking the box. It's literally a box shaker. You don't actually have to encode the shaking of the box in a silicon memory and then just shuffle everything around. Yeah, and you.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source