YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Lane

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247
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2022-09-07
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2022-09-07
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  1. “I have no doubt that we can fix the problem. It's an urgent problem. We need to fix it pretty sharpish. And I do have doubts about whether politically we are capable of coming together enough to not just in any one country but around the planet. I mean, I know we can do it, but do we have the will? Do we have the vision to accomplish it?”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I mean, I think we're more likely to do it inadvertently than through a nuclear war, which could happen at any time. But my fear is... We just don't know where the tipping points are, and we will We kind of think we're smart enough to fix the problem quickly if we really need to. I think that's the overriding assumption that we're all right for now. Maybe in 20 years time it's going to be a calamitous problem and then we'll really need to put some serious mental power into fixing it. Without seriously worrying that perhaps that is too late, and that however brilliant we are, we miss the boat.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Or just inadvertently through global warming and pollution and so on. Quite capable. I mean, we just need to pass the tipping point.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Probably accurate on a universal kind of scale. I don't think that humanity is in any danger of disturbing the universe at the moment.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “How would I describe that? I've actually really struggled with that term because the word, I mean, there's few words quite as good as eukaryotic to put everybody off immediately. You start using words like that and they'll leave the room. Krebs cycle is another one that gets people to leave the room So I've tried to think is there another word for eukaryotic that I can use. And really, the only word that I've been able to use is complex cells, complex life and so on. And that word, it serves one immediate purpose, which is to convey an impression. But then it means so many different things to everybody that actually is lost immediately. And so it's a kind of...”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, your question define the earth. I'm not sure I can do that. I mean, the first word that comes to mind is living. I wouldn't like to say mostly living, but perhaps.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “They're always asking why. I mean, that's my defining question is why. As people used to make a joke, I have a small scar on my forehead from a climbing accident years ago. And the guy I was climbing with had dislodged a rock and he shouted something, he shouted below, I think, meaning that the rock was coming down. And I hadn't caught what he said, so I looked up and he went and smashed straight on my forehead. And everybody around me took the pist saying he looked up to ask why.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think it's as close as we can get to happiness. That's not to say you're full of joy all the time, but it's as close as we can get to a sustained human happiness is by getting some fulfillment from what you're doing on a daily basis. And if what you're looking for is the world giving you the stamp of approval with a Nobel Prize or a fellowship or whatever it is, then I've known people like this who they're eaten away by the anger, the kind of caustic resentment that they've not been awarded this prize that they deserve.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “You'll never find happiness in success. I don't think there's a lovely quote from Robert Lewis Stevenson, I think, who said, nothing in life is so disenchanting as attainment.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Oh, you've got to be obsessive. But if you're doing what you really love doing, then it's not work anymore, is what you do.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So live in the moment and try and enjoy what you're doing. And that means really go to the... Go to the themes that you're most interested in and try and follow them as well as you can. And that tends to pay back in surprising ways. I don't know if you've found this as well, but I found that people will help you often. If they see some light shining in the eye and you're excited about their subject and just fun to talk about it. And they know that their friend in California's got a job coming up. They'll say, go for this, this guy's all right. They'll use the network to help you out if you really care. And you're not going to have a job two years down the line, but if what you really care about is what you're doing now, then it doesn't matter if you have a job in two years' time or not. It'll work itself out if you've got the light in your eye. And so that's the only advice I can give. And most people...”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And if what you're caring about is a career, then it's probably not the one for you. If though you can put that aside, and you know, I've also worked in industry for a brief period and I was mainly redundant twice, so I know that redundant.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “You have the next bond maybe on another continent, and it's only two years anyway. And there's no guarantee you're going to get a faculty position at the end of it.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So, the only advice that I actually ever give to my students is follow what you're interested in. Because they're often worried that if they make this decision now and do this course instead of that course, then they're going to restrict their career opportunities There isn't a career path in science. It's not, I mean, there is, but there isn't. There's a lot of competition, there's a lot of death symbolically. So who survives? The people who survive are the people who care enough to still do it. And they're very often the people who don't worry too much about the future and are able to live in the present. Because if you do a PhD, you've competed hard to get onto the PhD, then you have to compete hard to get a postdoc job.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “He told me the truth the first time I decided to believe that he was telling me the truth the second time as well and was delighted.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, well, this was an email, but I thought about it, the bottom line, he was right. And so I put the whole thing aside for about two months and spent the summer, which would have been, I guess, last summer, and then turned to it with full attention in about September or something and rewrote those chapters almost from scratch. I kept some of the material, but... Took me a long time to process it, to work out what needs to change, where does it need to change. I wasn't writing in this time. How am I going to tell this story better so it's more accessible? Think it's still difficult. It's still biochemistry, but it has, he ended up saying now he's got a barreling energy to it. And I was, you know, because he'd been...”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “The edit where it takes, yeah, but then there's the professional editors who come along as well. And I mean, in Transform The editor came back to me after I'd sent two months after I sent the first edition. He'd read the whole thing and he said the first two chapters prevent a formidable hurdle to the general reader. Go and do something about it. And that was the last thing I really wanted to”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “No, I usually find I'm perhaps a better editor than I am a writer. I write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Put a bunch”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So you end up navigating your own path through this landscape. And that can be thrilling because you don't know where it's going. And I'd like to think that that's one of the reasons my books have worked for people, because this sense of the thrilling adventure ride, I don't know where it's going either”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Say what we know. And I was shocked in the first couple of books how often I came up quickly against all the stuff we don't know. And if you're trying to, I've realized later on in supervising various physicists and mathematicians who are PhD students and their maths is way beyond what I can do. But the process of trying to work out what are we actually going to model here? What's going into this equation is a very similar one to writing. What am I going to put on a page? What's the simplest possible way I can encapsulate this idea so that I now have it as a unit that I can kind of see how it interacts with the other units? And you realize that, well, if this is like that and this is like this, then that can't be true.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “From people who are irritated by what you're doing. And you don't know who they are or what you're going to do that's going to irritate people. And in the end, all you can do is just try and... Please yourself. And that means what are these big fun, fascinating? Based questions, and what do we know about it? And can I convey that? And I kind of learnt in trying to write. First of all,”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Wanted to go to the edge of what we know, but be helped to get there. I don't want to be too much terminology. And so I want someone to keep a clean eye on what the question is. Beyond that, I've wondered a lot about who am I writing for. And that was in the end the only answer I had was myself at the age of 15 or 16. Because even if you're, you know, you just don't know who's reading, but also where are they reading it? Are they reading it in the bath or in bed or on the metro or are they listening to an audiobook? Do you want to have a recapitulation every few pages because you read three pages at a time? Or are you really irritated by that? You're going to get criticism.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I mean, I suppose there's a couple of points. One of them is, what's the story? What do I want to know? What do I want to convey? Why does it matter to anybody? And very often the biggest, most interesting questions, the childlike questions are the one that actually that everybody wants to ask, but don't quite do it in case they look stupid. And one of the nice things about being in science is the longer you're in, the more you realize that everybody doesn't know the answer to these questions. And it's not so stupid to ask them after all. So trying to Ask the questions I would have been asking myself at the age of 15, 16 when I was really hungry to know about the world and didn't know very much about it.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Well, maybe this is where consciousness comes in that we have transient joy, but with transient joy we have transient misery as well and sometimes with everything in biology getting the regulation right is practically impossible. You will always have a bell-shaped curve where some people unfortunately are at the joy end and some people are at the misery end and that's the way brains are wired and I doubt there's ever an escape from that. It's the same with sex and everything else as well. We're dealing with you can't regulate it so anything goes. It's all part of biology.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “But beyond all of that, I mean, I guess there's two ways you could come at it. One of them would be to say, well, you can effectively do the math and come to the conclusion that it's all pointless and that there's really no point in me being here any longer. And maybe that's true in the greater scheme of things. You can justify yourself in terms of society, but society will be gone soon enough as well. And you end up with a very bleak place just by logic.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I don't know. I mean, if it's a feature of life, then I suppose it would have to be true of other organisms as well. And I don't know. You're talking about dogs earlier on, and they can certainly be very sad and upset and may mooch for days after their owner died or something like that. So I suspect in some senses it's a feature of biology. It's probably a feature of mortality. It's probably a”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I kind of hope that I'm wrong about a lot of this because I can't say that my worldview is particularly uplifting. But in some sense, it doesn't matter if it's uplifting or not. Science is about what's reality, what's out there. Why is it this way? And I think there's beauty in that too.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I never came across a better idea than evolution. I mean, maybe I'm just ignorant and I don't know. You mentioned automator and so on. And I don't. Think specifically about that, but I have thought about it in terms of selective units of the origin of life and the difference between evolvability and complexity or just increasing complexity, but within very narrowly defined limits. The great thing about genes and about selection is it just knocks down all those limits. It gives you a world of information in the end, which is limited only by the biophysical reality of what kind of an organism you are, what kind of a planet you live on, and so on. And cities and all these other forms that look alive and could be described as alive, because they can't propagate themselves can only exist as the product of something that did propagate itself.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Place of what's noticeable doesn't tell you how it works. I think, I mean, I don't have any problem with what you're saying, really, except that. It's not possible without the humans we went from a hunter-gatherer type economy, if you like, without cities through to cities. And as soon as we get into human evolution and culture and society and so on, then yes, there are other forms of evolution, other forms of change. But cities don't directly propagate themselves. They propagate themselves through human societies and human societies only exist because humans as individuals propagate themselves.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “It doesn't give rise to an offspring city. So, I mean, it doesn't work by natural selection. It works by, if anything, memes, it works by.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Christopher Wren was making plans not only for St. Paul's Cathedral, but also to rebuild in large Parisian-type boulevards a large part of the area of central London that was burnt. And it never happened because they didn't have enough money, I think, but it's interesting what was in the plan. There were all these boulevards, but there were no pubs and no coffee houses or anything like that. And the reality was London just kind of grew up in a set of jumbled streets and it was the coffee houses and the pubs where all the business of the city of London was being done. And that was where the real life of the city was. And no one had planned it. The whole thing was unplanned and works much better that way. And in that sense, the cell is completely unplanned, is not controlled by the genes in the nucleus in the way that we might like to think that it is. But it's kind of evolved entity that has the same kind of flux, the same animation, the same.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Strictly nocturnal. Yes, I imagine that any aliens that are smart enough to get here would understand that they're not living beings. My reason for saying that is that we tend to think of biology in terms of information and forget about cells. And I was trying to draw a comparison between the cell as a city and the energy flow through the city and the energy flow through cells and the turnover of materials. And an interesting thing about cities is that they're not really exactly governed by anybody. There are regulations and systems and whatever else, but it's pretty loose. They have their own life, their own way of developing over time. And in that sense, they're quite biological. There was a plan after the Great Fire of London.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Probably, I mean, it's green. It's green and blue. I think that's the first thing you notice it stands out from space as being different to any of the other planets.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Think it's poetic and beautiful, and I often refer to the Earth as living planet, but it's not in biological terms an organism, no.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Well, not as an organism. I mean, the idea of Gaia is lovely. And James Lovelock originally put Gaia out as an organism that had somehow evolved. And he was immediately attacked by lots of people. And he's not wrong, but he backpedaled somewhat because that was more of a poetic vision than the science. The science is now called Earth Systems Science, and it's really about how does the world kind of regulate itself so it remains within the limits which are hospitable to life. And it does it amazingly well. And it is working at a planetary level of kind of integration of regulation. But it's not evolving by natural selection and it can't because there's only one of it. And so it can change over time, but it's not evolving. All the evolution is happening in the parts of the system.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Everything that I've said depends on the underlying rules of thermodynamics. There is no evolvability about that. It's simply an inevitable outcome of your starting point, assuming that you're able to increase the driving force through the system. You will generate more of the same, you'll expand on what you can do, but you'll never get anything different than that. And it's only when you introduce information into that as a gene, as a kind of small stretch of RNA which can be random stretch, then you get real evolvability, then you get biology as we know it. But you also have selection as we know it.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Catalyzers CO2 fixation, then you're going to increase the rate of flux through the whole system and you're going to effectively steepen the driving force to make more nucleotides. And this can be inherited because there are forms of membrane heredity that you can have and effectively. If a cell divides in two and it's got a lot of stuff inside it and that stuff is basically bound as a network which is capable of regenerating itself, then it will inevitably regenerate itself. And so you can develop greater complexity.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “There's a difference between complexity and evolution. So, some of the work we're doing on the origin of life is thinking about how do genes arise? How does information arise in biology? And thinking about it from the point of view of reacting CO2 with hydrogen, what do you get? Well, what you're going to get is carboxylic acids, then amino acids. It's quite hard to make nucleotides. It's possible to make them, and it's been done and it's been done following this pathway as well. But you might trace amounts. And so the next question, assuming that this is the right way of seeing the question, which maybe it's just not, but let's assume it is, is, well, how do you reliably make more nucleotides then? How do you become more complex and better at becoming a nucleotide generating machine? And the answer is, well, you need positive feedback loops, some form of autocatalysis. So that can work, and we know it happens in biology. If this nucleotide, for example,”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “The kind of timelines that Fred Hoyle was imagining, or at least not by any easy way of doing it, assuming that the speed of light is a limit. And then again, you really can't, this is something Richard Dawkins argued long ago, and I do think he's right. There is no other way to generate this level of complexity than natural selection. Nothing else can do it. You need populations and you need selection in populations and kind of an isolated interstellar cloud again. There's unlimited time or maybe there's no problems with distance, but you need to have... Certain frequency of generational time to generate a serious level of complexity. And I just have a feeling it's never going to work.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “How limited my thinking was, how narrow minded I was being. And here was a great physicist with a completely different conception of what life could be. And since then, I've seen him attacked in various ways. And I'm kind of reluctant to say the attacks make more sense to me than the original story, which is to say, even in terms of information processing, if you're on that scale and there's a limit of the speed of like, how quickly can something think if you're needing to broadcast across the solar system, it's going to be slow. It's not going to hold a conversation with you.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “I was budding biologists at the time, and this was the first time I'd come across someone really challenging the heart of biology and saying you are far too parochial, you're thinking about life as carbon-based. Here's a life form which is kind of dust, interstellar dust on a solar system scale. And it's a novel, but I felt enormously challenged by that novel because it hadn't occurred to me.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Connected to consciousness. I mean, I think any system which is going to bootstrap itself up from Plumissary origins. I mean, Me finish this and then I come on to something else. But from planetary origins is going to face similar constraints and those constraints are going to be addressed in similar basic engineering ways. And I think it will be cellular and I think it will have electrical chargers. And I think it will have to... Selected in populations over time, and all of these things will tend to give rise to the same processes as the simplest fix to a difficult problem. So I would expect it to be conscious, yes, and I would expect it to resemble life on Earth in many ways. When I was about, I guess 15 or 16, I remember reading a book by Fred Hoyle called The Black Cloud, which”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Of life on earth to my mind. Capable of some form of feelings in response to the environment. That's not to say it's intelligent, though he's got his own algorithms for intelligence, but nothing comparable with us. I think it's beautiful, what a planet, what a sterile planet can come up with. It's astonishing that it's come up with all of this stuff that we see around us and that either we Or whatever we produce is capable of destroying all of that. It is a sad thought, but it's also Hugely pessimistic. I'd like to think that we're capable of giving rise to something which is at least as good, if not better than us as AI.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “I think yes, there can be some beauty to it being the next step of life, and I don't know if consciousness matters or not from that point of view, to be honest with you. There's some sadness, yes, probably, because. Because I think it comes down to the selfishness that we were talking about earlier on. I am an individual with a desire not to be kind of displaced from life. I want to stay alive. I want to be here. So I suppose the threat that a lot of people would feel is that we will just be wiped out. that there will be potential conflicts between AI and humans and that AI will win because it's a lot smarter.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Pretty limited too. And the way we're going on at the moment, the likelihood of us not making ourselves extinct within the next few hundred years, possibly within the next 50 or 100 years, seems quite small. I hope we can do better than that. So maybe the only thing that will survive from humanity will be AI. And maybe AI, once it exists and once it's capable of effectively copying itself and cutting humans out of the loop, then maybe that will take over the universe.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “I find that no, it's not that I find it more compelling, it's that I find more probable, and I find all of them, I mean, there's a lot of hand waving in this. We just don't know. So I'm trying to read out from what I know about life on Earth to what might happen somewhere else. And it gives, to my mind, a bit of a pessimistic view of bacteria everywhere and only occasional intelligent life and running forward humans only once on Earth and nothing else that you would necessarily be any more excited about making contact with than you would be making contact with them on earth. So I think the chances are pretty limited and the chances of us”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “If the principles that govern the evolution of life on Earth apply to other planets as well. And I think a lot of them would. Then the likelihood of ending up with a human-like civilization capable of giving rise to AI in the first place is massively limited. Once you've done it once, perhaps it takes over the universe. And maybe there's no issue. But it seems to me that the two are necessarily linked, that you're not going to just turn a sterile planet into an AI lifeform without the intermediary of the organics first.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “My expectation, I suppose, is that we will be over the next hundred years or so if we survive at all, that AI will increasingly dominate and pretty much anything that we put out into space, looking for other, well, for the universe, for what's out there will be AI. It won't be us. We won't be doing that or when we do. It'll be on a much more limited scale. I suppose the same would apply to any alien civilization. So perhaps rather than looking for signs of life out there, we should be looking for AI out there. Then we face the problem that I don't see how a planet is going to give rise directly to AI. See how a planet can give rise directly to organic life.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I'm inclined to agree. I mean, my feeling is from my meagre knowledge of the history of science is that the biggest breakthrough has usually come through from a field that was not related. So, if anyone is not going to be a biologist who solves consciousness. Just because biologists are too embedded in the nature of the problem. And then nobody's going to believe you when you've done it because nobody's going to be able to prove that this AI is in fact conscious and sad in any case and any more than you can prove that a dog is conscious and sad. So it tells you that it is in good language and you must believe it. But I think most people will accept if faced with that that's what it is. All of this probability though of complex life. One way I think why it matters is that”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Let me compare it with classical versus quantum physics, classical physics is logical and you can understand the kind of language we're dealing with. It's almost at the human level we're dealing with stars and things that we can see. And when you get to quantum mechanics and things. It's practically impossible for the human mind to compute what just happened there.”

    2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source