YouSaid · the spoken record

Neal Stephenson

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144
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2021-11-11
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2021-11-11
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  1. “And if you hear a door slam, you might turn to see what it is. If the robot at the same time turns to look at the door slam, it's ratifying your perception.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Well, I mean, we're an evolved system that we have biological advantages in knowing where solid objects are. So we've got this system in our head that... That integrates our perceptions into this coherent view of things. One of the Take homes that I like from Husserl is the idea of intersubjectivity and the idea that a fundamental Requirement for us to stay sane For us to share our perceptions and have them ratified by other, they don't even have to be people, but a prisoner in solitary confinement might domesticate a mouse or even insects because they perceive the same things that the prisoner perceives. convinced him that he's not just hallucinating.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Phenomenology. And his stuff is pretty hard to. Hard to read. You really have to take it in small bites and go a little bit at a time. But he's trying to come to grips with these kinds of questions.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Lean towards the platonic view of things. So I believe that mathematical objects haven't. Reality that it's not all made up by human minds. And I don't know where that reality comes from. I can't explain it, but I do think that mathematical objects are discovered and not invented. I did a lot of, or not a lot, but I did some reading of Husserol when I was writing Anathem. And he's a 20th century phenomenologist. And he's writing in the same time as scientists are starting to understand atoms and becoming aware that when we look at this table, It's really just a slab of almost entirely vacuum. And there's a very sparse arrangement of tiny, tiny little particles there occupying that space that interact with each other in such a way that our brains perceive this object. So that's kind of the beginnings of”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Like, oh, wow, people really don't like the quad mount machine gun on top of my turret. Maybe I should get rid of that. And people would feel more at ease.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And it became his huge crowd favorite because you could see it was made of salad bowls and random pieces of hardware that this guy had scavenged from his farm. And so immediately people kind of fell in love with this one particular robot, whereas they might other robots might be like the bad guy, if you think of professional wrestling, the heel and the baby face. So people do, for reasons that are hard to understand, form these emotional reactions.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of my exposure to robots is that I'm. Associated with a combat robotics team, and I've been to a few battle bots competitions. And that's not like in a lot of ways, Pretty far from the kind of robotics you're talking about because these robots are remote controlled. They're not autonomous. And so they're pretty simple. But it's interesting to watch people's emotional reactions to different robots. So there was one that was in the last year's season, the 2020 season called Rusty that was just like put together out of spare parts and it looked kind of cute.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I do not think about it a lot because it's a deep topic and I'm not, I don't consider myself super well informed about it. And AI seems to be a term that is applied to a lot of different things. So I've messed around just a tiny little bit with neural nets, with, what's it called, PCA principal component analysis. So I guess I tend to think in terms of sort of granular bottom-up. Um, Ideas rather than big picture top down”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “But no, tiling is a really interesting problem both two and three dimensional tiling problems are fascinating and they're one of those ancient puzzles that has Attracted Brainiacs for centuries.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, I'm interested in all kinds of tiling, but I'm not. I know my limitations as a math guy. So hexagons are about my speed.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, I think Uber did it because someone, one of my friends who knows of my interest in this and who likes to give me a hard time sent me a link. This is a couple years ago to Code base that I think came out of Uber where they had done this. You break down the whole surface of the earth into little hexagons. So that was a real knife through the heart. But I'll probably come back to it someday.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, so you can't make that go away. So any system that you come up with to do this has got to have these exceptions built into it for those 12, you could have quintillions of hexagons, but you still got to have 12 pentagons somewhere. So So I've blown a hell of a lot of time on that over the years.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think Roger's a little above my level. And tiling. Yeah. Yeah. So I did a lot of that. And I thought, you know, it was pretty cool. But there's some surprisingly intractable problems that keep coming up. You've always got to have. Some Pentagons. Like, if you start with an icosahedron, which is equilateral triangles, which is a logical place to start. You can cover those with hexagons, but every vertex where the triangles come together is a pentagon, has to be a pentagon.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, yeah. So it's that. And people who know me are always now make fun of me for this. So they'll send me. If they see a picture with hexagons in it, they'll send me a link to make fun of me. So”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, any spherical. Object, yeah, but with an eye towards. Putting it on the earth. And so, and have it be recursive. So you can have hexagons within hexagons, which is hard because probably a bad idea because you can't tile Hexagon with smaller hexagons. They stick out.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “The thing I've spent the most amount of time on is I got obsessed a long time ago. Trying to tile the globe with hexagons”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, like, I mean, most of this stuff nobody will ever see, and yet I'm creating it as if there were an audience that might read this stuff because that's a necessary constraint that helps me do a better job.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, yeah. And when I do a mathematica notebook, if I'm trying to figure something out, I spend a lot of time typing. Just my stuff is just huge blocks of text. It's just me thinking out loud and then some graphs and calculations and stuff because to me that act of explaining things and commenting helps me understand what I'm doing.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think, at least speaking for myself, I'm always thinking in terms of an audience. And at some level, I feel like I'm doing this for someone or communicating to someone, even if there's not a specific someone in mind. It could just be an abstract, theoretical someone. And like another app, I spend a lot of time in is mathematica. When I do math.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, it just depends on what is there in the way of applications, the content. And can it feed you those things? Can it give you, like in my example of using the CAD program, it gives me the ability to do something I enjoy, which is making, imagining things and making things in a particular way?”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, I mean, that's my game. That's what I'm up to. But, you know, it happens that if you're building a virtual environment, if you're making a game level or creating a virtual set for a film or TV production, the thing that you're designing in the program may never physically exist. In fact, it's preferable that it doesn't because the whole point of that is to. To make imaginary things that couldn't build otherwise. So I think lots of people spend a good chunk of their working hours in something that's pretty close to VR. It's just that currently the output device happens to be a rectangular object in front of them. You could replace that with a VR headset and they'd be doing the same stuff.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Well, like, I'll give maybe an example that's a bridge, which is that I've been, I like making things. So I like working in a machine shop and making objects with 3D printers or machines or whatever. And so I've had to learn how to get good at using a CAD program. There's many to choose from. I use one called Fusion 360. I can spend hours in that trying to create, imagine, and create the things I want to create. And it's not virtual reality exactly, but that whole time. My whole field of view is occupied by this monitor that's showing me a window into a three-dimensional space. I'm rotating things around. I'm imagining things. I'm making things. And so that is pretty close to being in virtual reality.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “For entertainment, maybe for certain applications. I'm personally more. I mean, we have to make a distinction between what I would personally find interesting and what might win in the market. So maybe some people, maybe lots of people would like to spend a huge amount of time in VR. I'm personally more interested in enhancing the experience that I have of the physical world because the physical world's pretty cool, there's a lot to be said for moving around in the real world.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “True. True. So there are still issues in those fantastical worlds with. With motion sickness. So if your body is experiencing acceleration, your inner ear that differs from what your eye thinks it's seeing, then you'll get sick unless you're very unusual person. So it doesn't mean you can't do it. It just A constraint that VR designers have to learn to work with”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I've always been a fan of AR, and it's kind of an easy answer because if you're wearing an AR device and you put a bag over your head, it becomes a VR device. If you block out what's really there, then all you're seeing is a VR.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Can go and play fetch or something for a while if you want, but you don't have to. So we worked on that and a bigger project that was more of a storytelling and a fictional universe. The hardware is worth a look. There's still a belief. I just saw it this morning looking at Twitter that the magic leap never shipped anything. But they've been since 2019, you can. Go to their website and buy one of these devices anytime you. To spend the money”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “We thought highly of the idea for sure. But because of the slam, the system knew, for example, here's a table, here's a little end table. We know the heights, we know how high our animated baby goat can jump. And so our engineers had to build a system for converting the slam primitives into game engine objects that the AIs and the game could navigate. And that ended up shipping as more of a dev kit or a sort of how-to a sample app Then, as a finished consumer facing.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah. No, I can see the parallels for sure. You know, we'll see. It was a fun project. We worked on an app, for example, called Baby Goats, which just populated your room with baby goats.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “So for sure that's true. And so I was working on consumer-facing content. There was a great team in Wellington, New Zealand that made a game called Dr. Groybrut's Invaders that Realize the potential of AR gaming in a way that I don't think anything else has before or since. And so that was definitely the strategy until, what, April 2020, which is when the company decided to pivot to commercial industrial applications instead. I haven't seen their financial projections, but I assume they had good reasons for making that strategic decision. It just means that it's no longer necessarily targeted at. End users who want to play a game or be entertained, but it's, you know.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Well, there's a base layer of engineering that you have to have no matter what. But you're certainly right that people, like in the early days of video games, put up with kind of low frame rate and what we would now call crappy graphics because they were having so much fun playing Doom or whatever.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Right. Yeah, Will said, and it's just one of the things that. The system has to do, it's also tracking your eyes so it knows what you're looking at, how far away what you're looking at is it's performing all those functions and it's got to keep doing that without burning up the CPU or depleting the battery unreasonably fast. And that's just table stakes. It's just the basic functions of the operating system and then any content that you want to add has to sit on top of that. It's got to be rendered by the optics at a sufficiently low latency that it looks real and you don't get sick. So it's an amazing thing. And magically shipped device that can do that in 2019. And they're about to ship the ML2. But I don't know any more about that than anyone else because I don't work there anymore.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Thanks. Chief Futurist. And so I sort of had a little squad of people in Seattle doing what you might call content R&D. So we're trying to make content for AR. Because it's such a new medium, it's more of an engineering RD project almost than a creative project. So it was fascinating to see everything that goes into making an AR system that runs. So AR, an AR device, if it's really going to do AR, needs to be running slam in real time. And that alone is a big.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Mosquitoes, then it's easy to just buy into that and not be alert to the possible downsides. And of course, we know that The way that those early reactors were built and the way that the supply chain was built to create the fuel and deal with the waste was poorly thought out and were still dealing with the resulting problems that places like Hanford in the state of Washington. And we know that DDT, although it did kill a lot of insects, also had terrible effects on bird populations. So the kind of backlash that happened in the 70s that is still kind of going on is to sort of assume that everything is a double-edged sword and always to look for We have to absolutely convince ourselves that the downside isn't going to come back and bite us before we can adopt any new technology. I think the People are overly sensitized to that now.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I wouldn't say all. I think going back to what we were talking about earlier, how technology developed in the 50s and 60s, there was a period of time there when people maybe had unrealistic ideas about new technology and weren't sufficiently attentive to the possible downsides. So we got, and there's a reason why, I mean, in the mid-20th century, we saw antibiotics, we saw the polio vaccine, we saw just simple things like refrigerators in the home. My grandmother to her dying day called the refrigerator the ice box because when she grew up, it was a box with ice in it. So you see all that change and it's Largely for the benefit of people. And so if somebody comes along. Says, hey, we're going to build nuclear reactors to make energy. Or here's a new chemical called DDT that's going to kill.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “You know, in an indirect way, maybe. I mean, you know what people will say, which is the same argument that has been leveled against space exploration since the Apollo program, which is why don't we solve our problems here on Earth before we spend money going into space. So I've never been a believer in that argument. I think there could be a sense in which the new perspective that could be obtained by thinking about like if we're thinking about terraforming Mars changing its atmosphere, making it more amenable to life and survival, you could see that maybe changing people's opinions about terraforming the Earth.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Yeah, no, I think that's fair. So, you know, we may be entering one of those interesting times of hardship in the Chinese curse sense. Yeah. So I could be wrong, but I mean, there have been some efforts to explore solar geoengineering. There was a plan to send up some balloons, high-altitude balloons to take some measurements in Scandinavia that got squashed by objections from people who lived up there who were just opposed to the whole program on principle. So we'll see a lot more of that. And it's going to be a hard program to advocate for just because I think people don't quite understand how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere and how far we are from even slowing down. The rate that we're adding more to say nothing of bringing that number down. We're a long way out from that.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “If this were to happen, I think it would be either an individual or more likely just some government somewhere that just decides it's in their interests to unilaterally do this. And that's not me advocating it. It's just. It's It would be comparatively so cheap and easy to implement a solar geoengineering scheme that someone is probably going to do it once things get bad enough. But I don't think that governments will or Western governments just because they're not. We've seen what happened with vaccines, right? So, you know, getting. Getting people to take vaccinations or wear masks has turned out to be incredibly hard, even though it might save those people's lives.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Willing to consider using a technological intervention. The fact is that it's going to have different effects on different parts of the world. So some areas may suffer negative, more negatives than positives. And they're not going to be happy.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “So, this guy is one of those, he's read these papers. The TR, the character in the book, he knows all this. And all people who are familiar with climate science kind of know this. It's a pretty well-established fact. And so he just decides he's going to take action unilaterally and do this. And so there's different ways to get the sulfur up there, but because it's Texas, he builds the biggest gun in the world. It's just six barrels pointed straight up and he begins firing shells loaded with sulfur into the stratosphere. And so the book is about not so much that as how people react to his doing that, what the political ramifications are around the world. Because, you know, this is extremely controversial. And not everyone's on board with it. And even if you.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Is it's not permanent. So if you don't like what's happening, you can just stop and wait a couple years and you'll get back to where you started. And the bad news, if you're in favor of this kind of thing, is that you have to keep doing it forever.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “So that was our first kind of clue that what was being injected into the stratosphere was sulfur dioxide. And so we know then Pinatubo came along in the 90s and did this experiment for us. So we know that sulfur in the stratosphere, it forms little spherical droplets of sulfuric acid after it combines with water. those bounce back some of the sun's rays and reduce the amount of solar energy entering the troposphere, which is where we live. So we know that it works. And we also know that this stuff goes away after a couple of years. So it gradually washes out. And so it's not a permanent thing. The good news, bad news is good news.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “This is called Solar Geoengineering, and we know that it's a possibility on a technical level because volcanoes have been doing it forever. So many times in human history, we've seen a volcanic eruption that was followed by a global cooling trend that lasted for a couple of years. And one of these things happened, I think, in the 60s or 70s in Indonesia. The Australians sent a plane up into the stratosphere to take some samples of the plume. And when it came back down, the windscreen of the plane had sort of a deposit on it. So one of the Australian scientists licked it and reported that it was painfully acid.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “And taking it out is hard. It's a big. It took us a long time. We had to empty out huge coal mines and oil reservoirs and burn all that stuff. We had to chop down forests and dig up peat bogs in order to create all of that CO2. And so we have to reverse all of those processes somehow in order to remove the CO2 and get it back down hopefully into the 200 and some parts per million range where it used to be.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “It stays up there. So I think just last week China announced that they're going to try to level off their CO2 emissions in like 2030. So 2031, they'll only put as much CO2 into the atmosphere as they did in 2030, which is still a lot of CO2 in 2060. They're saying will be net zero. So if everyone in the world does that and the PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere by then is, say, 450 parts per million, it'll stay at 450 parts per million until we take it out.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Right. So ultimately, we don't solve the problem. CO2 out of the atmosphere. But that is going to take a while. We're still adding more. We haven't even started to reduce the amount.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Yeah, I didn't interpret Jaron's statements as being entirely cynical and hopeless. I mean, he's definitely raising issues of concern. But he wouldn't be out writing the books that he's written and talking about this stuff if he didn't think there was a way.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “It's very nice. Well, the last time I kind of paid attention to Jaron's thoughts on, and he was thinking in terms of That basically there should be micropayments such that if I clicking the like button on something, I'm essentially giving Valuable intellectual property to Facebook or Twitter or whatever. It's not a very large amount of IP, but it's definitely a transfer of information that when they aggregate it is beneficial to them. And now I do remember that he On his interview with you was talking about data unions or, yeah.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Not at all. I mean, I listened to your interview with Jaron a couple of weeks ago. I know Jaron, and we've talked about this”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Me, I'd like to see that. I think it's where. A lot of the brain power went during the last couple of generations because people who might previously have been building rockets or other kinds of hard technologies ended up instead going into programming computer science, which is understandable and great. We've got structural problems right now in the way social media works that are pretty severe. Certainly hope that we're not 10 years from now that we're not exactly where we are today when it comes to that stuff. We need to move on.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “It yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, things have slowed down quite our ability to. To build things at pace is a lot less than it was. And there's reasons for that. We're more concerned with safety and environmental impacts than people were when they were building some of the great public's works projects of the mid-20th century. But even we're at the point now we're even just maintaining the stuff that we've got is such a huge project that we need to put big resources into it and good minds into it or else we're going to be losing things that we take for granted.”

    2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source