Lex Fridman PodcastPeter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality | Lex Fridman Podcast #250
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,206 words- 0:00 – 0:33
Introduction
- LFLex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Peter Wang, one of the most impactful leaders and developers in the Python community, former physicist, current philosopher, and someone who many people told me about and praised as a truly special mind that I absolutely should talk to. Recommendations ranging from Travis Oliphant to Eric Weinstein. So here we are. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now here's my conversation with Peter Wang.
- 0:33 – 4:04
Python
- LFLex Fridman
You're one of the most impactful humans in the Python ecosystem. (laughs) Uh, so you're an engineer, leader of engineers, but you're also a philosopher. So let's talk both in this conversation about programming and philosophy. First, programming-
- PWPeter Wang
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
... what to you is the best or maybe the most beautiful feature of Python, or maybe the thing that made you fall in love or stay in love with Python?
- PWPeter Wang
Well, those are three different things. Uh, what I think-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- PWPeter Wang
... is most beautiful, what made me fall in love, what made me stay in love, when I first started using it was when I was a C++ computer graphics performance nerd.
- LFLex Fridman
In the '90s?
- PWPeter Wang
In, yeah, late '90s. And that was my first job out of college. Um, and we kept trying to do more and more, uh, like abstract and higher order programming in C++, which at the time was quite difficult, um, with templates, the, the compiler support wasn't great, et cetera. So when I started playing around with Python, that was my first time encountering really first class support for types, for functions, and things like that, and it felt so incredibly expressive. So that was what kind of made me fall in love with it a little bit. And also, once you spend a lot of time in a C++ dev environment, the ability to just whip something together that basically runs and works the first time is amazing. So a really productive scripting language. I mean, I, I knew Perl, I knew Bash. I was decent at both, but Python just made everything, it, it made the whole world accessible, right? I could script this and that and the other network things, you know, little hard drive utilities. I could write all these things in the space of an afternoon.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
And that was really, really cool. So that's what made me fall in love.
- LFLex Fridman
Is there something specific you can put your finger on that you're not programming in Perl today?
- PWPeter Wang
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Like why, why Python for scripting?
- PWPeter Wang
Oh, I think there's not a specific thing as much as the design motif of both the, the creator of the language and the core, uh, group of people that built the standard library around him. Um, there was definitely, there was a taste to it. I mean, Steve Jobs, you know, used that term, you know, in somewhat of a arrogant way, but I think it's a real thing, that it was designed to fit. Uh, a friend of mine actually expressed this really well. He said, "Python just fits in my head," and there's nothing better to, to say than that. Now, now people might argue modern Python, there's a lot more complexity, but certainly as of version 5, 1.5.2 I think was my first version, um, that fitted my head very easily.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
So that's what made me fall in love with it.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay, so the most beautiful feature of Python that made you stay in love. It's like over the years, what has like, you know, you do a double take and you, you return to often as, as a thing that just brings you a smile?
- PWPeter Wang
I really still like the, um, the ability to play with meta classes and express higher order things. When I have to create some new object model to, to model something, right, it's easy for me 'cause I'm, I'm pretty expert as a Python programmer, I can easily put all sorts of lovely things together and use properties and decorators and other kinds of things and create something that feels very nice. So that, that to me, I would say that's tied with the NumPy and vectorization, uh, capabilities. I love thinking in terms of the matrices and the vectors and these kind of, um, uh, data structures. So, uh, I would say those two are kind of, uh, uh, tied for me.
- LFLex Fridman
So the elegance of the NumPy data structure, like slicing through the different multi-dimensional arrays.
- PWPeter Wang
Yeah, there's just enough things there, it's like a very, it's a very simple, comfortable tool. Just it's easy to reason about what it does when you don't stray too far afield.
- 4:04 – 24:07
Programming language design
- PWPeter Wang
- LFLex Fridman
Can you, uh, put your finger on how to design a language such that it fits in your head? Certain things like the colon or the certain notation aspects of Python that just kind of work. Is it, uh, something you have to kind of write out on paper, look and, and say it's just right? Is it a taste thing or is there a systematic process? What's your sense?
- PWPeter Wang
I think it's more of a taste thing, but one, one thing that should be said is that you have to pick your audience, right? So the better defined the user audience is or the users are, the easier it is to build something that fits in their minds because their needs will be more compact and coherent. It is possible to find a projection, right, a compact projection for their needs. The more diverse the user base-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Yeah.
- PWPeter Wang
... um, the harder that is.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- PWPeter Wang
And so as Python has grown in popularity, that's also naturally created more complexity as people try to design any given thing. There will be multiple valid opinions about a particular design approach. And so I do think that's the, that's the downside of popularity. It's almost an intrinsic aspect of the complexity of the problem.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, at the very beginning, aren't you an audience of one? Isn't ultimately, aren't all the greatest projects in history-
- PWPeter Wang
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
... were just solving a problem that you yourself had?
- PWPeter Wang
Well, so Clay Shirky in his, um, book on crowdsourcing or in his kind of thoughts on crowdsourcing, he identifies the first step of crowdsourcing is me-first collaboration.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- PWPeter Wang
You first have to make something that works well for yourself.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- PWPeter Wang
It's very telling that when you look at all of the impactful big proj- well, they're fundamental projects now in the SciPy and PyData ecosystem, they all started with the, uh, people in the domain trying to scratch their own itch. And the whole idea of scratching your own itch is something that the open source or the free software world has known for a long time, but in the scientific computing areas, you know, these are assistant professors or electrical engineering grad students. They didn't have really a lot of programming skill necessarily, but Python was just good enough for them to put something together that fit in their domain.... right? So it's almost like a, it's a, a necessity is the mother of invention aspect, and also it was a really harsh filter for utility and compactness and expressiveness. Like, it was too hard to use, then they wouldn't have built it, 'cause that was just too much trouble.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
Right? It was a side project for them.
- LFLex Fridman
And also necessity creates a kind of deadline. It seems like a lot of these projects are quickly thrown together in the f- in the first step, and that, even though it's flawed, that just seems to work well for software projects.
- PWPeter Wang
Well, it does work well for software projects in general, and in this particular space, um, uh, one, one of my colleagues, uh, Stan Seabert identified this, that all the projects in the SciPy ecosystem, um, you know, if we just rattle them off, there's NumPy, there's SciPy, built by different collaborations of people, although Travis is the heart of both of them, um, but NumPy coming from Numerica and Numery, these are different people. And then you've got Pandas, you've got Jupyter, uh, or IPython. There's, um, there's Matplotlib. There's just so many others that I'm, you know, not gonna do justice if I tried naming them all, but all of them are actually different people.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
And as they rolled out their projects, the fact that they had limited resources meant that they were humble about scope.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
Um, uh, a- a- a great, um, famous hacker, Jamie Zawiskie, once said that every, every geek's dream is to build the, uh, the ultimate middleware, right? And the, the thing is, with these scientist-turned-programmers, they had no such dream. They were just trying to write something that was a little bit better for what they needed than MATLAB, and they were gonna leverage what everyone else had built. So naturally, almost in kind of this annealing process or whatever, we built a very modular cover of the basic needs of a scientific computing library.
- LFLex Fridman
If you look at the whole human story-
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... how much of a leap is it? We've, uh, developed all kinds of languages, all kinds of methodologies for communication, and just kinda like grew this collective intelligence. The civilization grew. It expanded.
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
We wrote a bunch of books, and now we tweet. Uh, how big of a leap is programming if programming's yet another language? Is it just a nice little trick that's temporary in our human history, or is it like a s- a big leap in the, um, almost us becoming, uh, another organism at a higher level of abstraction, something else?
- PWPeter Wang
I think the act of programming or, uh, using grammatical constructions of some underlying primitives, that is something that humans do learn, but every human learns this. Anyone who can speak learns how to do this. What makes programming different has been that, up to this point, when we try to give instructions to computing systems, all of our computers... Well, actually, this is not quite true, but I'll, I'll first say it and then I'll tell y- tell you why it's not true.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- 24:07 – 34:07
Virtuality
- LFLex Fridman
You've written about this idea of virtuality-
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... on this topic, which you define as, "The subjective phenomenon of knowingly engaging with virtual sensation and perception and suspending or forgetting the context, that it's a simulacrum." So let me ask, uh, what is real?
- PWPeter Wang
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Is there a hard line between reality and virtuality? Like, perception drifts from some kind of physical reality.
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
We have to kind of have a sense of what is the line as to we've gone too far?
- PWPeter Wang
Right, right. For me, it's not about, uh, any hard line about physical reality as much as, um, a simple question of, um, does the particular technology help people connect in a more integral way with other people, with their environment, with all of the full spectrum of things around them? So it's less about, "Oh, this is a virtual thing, and this is a hard, real thing," more about when we create virtual representations of the real things, um, always some things are lost in translation. Usually, m- many, many dimensions are lost in translation, right? We ha- we're now coming to, uh, almost two years of COVID, people on Zoom all the time. You know it's different when you meet somebody in person than when you see them on s- I've seen you on YouTube lots, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
Um, but then seeing you in person is very different. And so I think when we engage in virtual experiences all the time, and we only do that, there is absolutely a level of embodiment, there's a level of, uh, embodied experience and participatory interaction that is lost. Um, and it's very hard to put your finger on exactly what it is. It's hard to say, "Oh, we're gonna spend $100 million building a new system that captures this five dem- five, 5% better higher fidelity human expression." No one's gonna pay for that, right? So when we rush madly into a world of simulacrum and- and virtuality, um, you know, the things that are lost are, it- it's difficult. Once everyone moves there, it's, it can be hard to look back and see what we've- what we've lost.
- LFLex Fridman
So is it irrecoverably lost, or rather, when you put it all on the table, is it possible for more to be gained than is lost? If you look at video games, they create virtual experiences that are surreal.
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
And can bring joy to a lot of people and can connect-
- PWPeter Wang
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
... a lot of people, uh, and can get people to talk a lot of trash.
- PWPeter Wang
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, so it can bring out the best and the worst in people. So is it possible to have a future world where the pros outweigh the cons?
- PWPeter Wang
It is. I mean, it's possible to have that in the- in the current world. But, um, when literally trillions of dollars of capital are tied to using those things to groom the worst of our inclinations and to attack our weaknesses, uh, in the limbic system to create these things into id machines versus connection machines, then, um, then the- th- those good things don't stand a chance.
- LFLex Fridman
Can you make a lot of money by building connection machines? Is y- uh, is it possible, do you think, to bring out the best in human nature to, uh, create fulfilling connections and relationships in the digital world and make a shit ton of money?
- PWPeter Wang
Um, if I figure it out, I'll let you know. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
But what's your intuition without concretely knowing-
- PWPeter Wang
My-
- LFLex Fridman
... what's s- s- the solution?
- PWPeter Wang
My intuition is that a lot of our digital technologies give us the ability to have synthetic connections or to experience virtuality. They have co-evolved with sort of the human expectations. It's- it's sort of like sugary drinks. As people have more sugary drinks, they get- they need more sugary drinks to get that same hit, right? So with these virtual things, um, and with TV, uh, and fast cuts, and, you know, TikToks, and all these different kinds of things, we're co-creating essentially humanity that sort of asks and needs those things. And now it becomes very difficult to get people to slow down. It gets difficult for people to hold their attention on- on slow things and actually feel that embodied experience, right? So mindfulness now more than ever is so important in schools and, um, as a therapy technique for people because our environment has been accelerated. And- and McLuhan actually talks about this in the electric environment of the television, and that was before TikTok and before-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
... front-facing cameras. So I think for me the- the concern is that it's not like we can ever switch to doing something better, but more of the humans and technology, they're not independent of each other. The technology that we use kind of molds what we need for the next generation of technology.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, but humans are intelligent, and they're, uh, introspective, and they can reflect on the experiences of their life.
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
So for example, there's been many years in my life where I- I ate an excessive amount of sugar.
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- 34:07 – 41:05
Human layers
- PWPeter Wang
- LFLex Fridman
So you've said that individual humans are multilayered, susceptible to signals and waves and multiple strata. The physical, the biological, social, cultural, intellectual. So sort of going along these lines, can you describe the layers of the cake that, that is a human being?
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
And maybe the human collective, human society?
- PWPeter Wang
So I'm just stealing wholesale here from Robert Pirsig, um, who is the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and in his, um, follow-on book, uh, is a sequel to it called Lila. He goes into this in, in a little more detail, but, um, it's, it's a, it's a crude approach to thinking about people, but I think it's still an advancement over traditional subject-object metaphysics, where we look at people as a dualist would say, "Well, is, is your mind, uh, you know, your consciousness, is that, is that just merely the matter that's in your brain, or is there something kind of more beyond that?" And they would say, "Yes, there's a soul, sort of ineffable soul beyond just merely the physical body." Right? And then, uh, and I'm not one of those people, right? I think that we don't have to draw a line between our things only this or only that. Collectives of things can emerge structures and patterns that are just as real as the underlying pieces, but, you know, they're transcendent, but they're still of the underlying pieces. So your body is this way. I mean, we just know physically you're, you consist of atoms and, uh, and, and, and whatnot, and then the atoms are arranged into molecules, which then arrange into certain kinds of structures that seem to have a homeostasis to them. We call 'em cells, and those cells form, you know, sort of biological structures.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
Those biological structures give your body its physical ability and its biological ability to consume energy and to maintain homeostasis, but humans are social animals. I mean, human by themselves is, is not very long for the world. So we also, part of our biology is wired to connect to other people, to, you know, from the mirror neurons to our language, uh, centers and all these other things. So we are intrinsically, there's a layer, there's a part of us that wants to be part of a thing. If we're around other people not saying a word, but they're just up and down jumping and dancing and laughing, we're gonna feel better, right? And they didn't, there was no exchange of physical anything. They didn't give us like five atoms of happiness, right? But there's an induction in our own sense of self that is at that social level...... and then beyond that, um, uh, Pirsig puts the intellectual level kind of one level higher than social. I think they're actually more intertwined than, than that, but the intellectual level is the, the level of pure ideas, that you are a vessel for memes, you're a vessel for philosophies. You will conduct yourself in a particular way. I mean, I think part of this is, if we think about it from a physics perspective, you're not, you know, there's the joke that physicists like to, um, approximate things, and we'll say, "Well, approximate a spherical cow," right? You're not a spherical cow, you're not a spherical human. You're a messy human, and we can't even, um, say what the dynamics of your emotion will be unless we analyze all four of these layers, right? Um, if it's, if it's, if you're, if you're Muslim at a certain time of day, guess what? You're gonna be on the ground kneeling and praying, right? And that has nothing to do with your biological need to get on the ground or physics of gravity. It is an intellectual drive that you have, it's a cultural phenomenon and an intellectual belief that you carry. So that's what the four-layer stack, um, is, is all about. It's that a person's not only one of these things, they're all of these things at the same time. It's a superposition of dynamics that run through us that make us who we are.
- LFLex Fridman
S- so no layer is, uh, special?
- PWPeter Wang
Um, uh, not so much no layer is special. Each layer is just different.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- PWPeter Wang
Um, but we are, but-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Each layer gets their participation trophy. (laughs)
- PWPeter Wang
E- each layer, yeah, each layer is a part of what you are. You are a layered cake, right? Of all these things. And if we try to deny, right, so many philosophies do try to deny the reality of some of these things, right? Some people will say, "Well, we're only atoms." Well, we're not only atoms because there's a lot of other things that are only atoms. I can reduce a human being to a bunch of soup and it's not, they're not the same thing, even though it's the same atoms.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
So I think the, the order and the patterns that emerge within humans, um, to understand, to really think about what a next generation philosophy would look like, that would allow us to reason about extending humans into the digital realm, or to interact with autonomous intelligences that are not biological in nature, we really need to appreciate these, that human, what human beings actually are-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
... is the superposition of these different layers.
- LFLex Fridman
You mentioned consciousness. Are each of these layers of cake conscious? Is consciousness a particular quality of, of one of the layers? Is there, like, a spike if you have a consciousness detector at, at these layers-
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... or it's something that just permeates all of these layers and just takes different form?
- PWPeter Wang
I believe what humans experience as consciousness is something that sits on a gradient scale of a general principle in the universe that seems to look for order and reach for order when there's an excess of energy. You know, it's, it's, it would be odd to say a proton is alive, right? It'd be odd to say, like, this particular atom or molecule of, of hydrogen gas is alive, but there's certainly something we can make assemblages of these things that cr- that cr- that aut- that have autopoeitic aspects to them, that will create structures that will, you know, crystalline solids will form very interesting and beautiful structures. Um, this gets kind of into weird mathematical territories. You start thinking about Penrose and Game of Life stuff, uh, about the generativity of math itself, like, the hyperreal numbers, things like that. But, um, without going down that rabbit hole, I would say that there seems to be a tendency in the world that when there is excess energy, things will structure and pattern themselves and they will then actually furthermore try to create an environment that furthers their continued stability. Uh, it's a concept of a externalized extended phenotype or niche construction. So, um, this is ultimately what leads to certain kinds of amino acids forming certain kinds of structures and so on and so forth until you get the ladder of life. So what we experience of, as consciousness, no, I don't think cells are conscious at that level. But is there something beyond mere equilibrium state biology and, and chemistry and biochemistry that drives what makes things work? I think there is. Um, uh, so Adrian Bejan has this constructal law. There's other things you look at. When you look at the life sciences and you look at, um, any kind of, uh, statistical physics and statistical mechanics, when you look at things far out of equilibrium, uh, when you have excess energy, what happens then? Life doesn't just make a hotter soup. It starts making structure. There's something there.
- LFLex Fridman
The poetry of reaches for order when there's an excess of energy.
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Because you brought up Game of Life.
- PWPeter Wang
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) You did it, not me. My f- I love cellular automata, so I have to sort of linger on that for, for a little bit.
- 41:05 – 46:29
Life
- LFLex Fridman
(exhales) So cellular automata, I guess, is, uh, or Game of Life is a very simple example of reaching for order when there's an excess of energy, or reaching for order and somehow creating complexity, uh, w- within, like, this, this explosion of just turmoil somehow trying to construct structures-
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... and in so doing, uh, create very elaborate organism-looking type things.
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
What intuition do you draw from this simple, uh, mechanism?
- PWPeter Wang
Well, I, I like to turn that around on its head and, um, and look at it as, what if every single one of the patterns created life or created, you know, not life, but created interesting patterns? 'Cause, you know, some of them don't, and sometimes you make cool gliders, and other times, you know, you start with certain things and you make gliders and other things that then construct, like, you know, AND gates and NOT gates, right? And you build computers on them. Um, all of these rules that create these patterns that we can see, those are just the patterns we can see. What if our subjectivity is actually limiting our ability to perceive the order in all of it?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
You know, what if some of the things that we think are random are actually not that random? We're simply not integrating at a fine enough level across a broad enough time horizon. Um, and this is, again, where I said we go down the rabbit hole of some of the Penrose stuff or, like, Wolfram's explorations on these things. Um, there is something deep and beautiful in the mathematics of all this that is hopefully one day I'll have enough money to where I can retire and just ponder those, (laughs) those questions, but there's something there.
- LFLex Fridman
But you're saying there's a ceiling to when you have enough money and you retire and you ponder it, there's a ceiling to how much you can truly ponder because there's cognitive limitations in what you're able to...... perceive as a pattern.
- PWPeter Wang
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
So, and, uh, maybe mathematics extends your perception capabilities, but it's still, it's still finite. It's, it's just like-
- PWPeter Wang
Yeah. The, the mathematics we use is the mathematics that can fit in our head.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- PWPeter Wang
You know, did God really create the integers? (laughs) Or did Cr- God create all of it and we just happen, at this point in time, to be able to perceive integers?
- LFLex Fridman
Well, he just did the, the positive inte- int- uh...
- PWPeter Wang
She, I should say.
- LFLex Fridman
She, she. (laughs)
- PWPeter Wang
Did she create all the integers? And then we-
- LFLex Fridman
Um, did, she, she, she just created the natural numbers and then we screwed it all up with zero, and then I guess, okay. Uh-
- PWPeter Wang
But we did, we created mathematical, uh, operations so that we can have iterated steps-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
... to approach bigger problems, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- PWPeter Wang
I mean, the entire p- the entire point of the Arabic numeral system, and it's a rubric for mapping a certain set of operations and folding them into a simple little expression, but that's just the operations that we can fit in our heads. There are many other operations besides, right?
- LFLex Fridman
The thing that worries me the most about aliens and humans is that there are aliens that are all around us, and we're too dumb-
- PWPeter Wang
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... to see them.
- PWPeter Wang
Oh, certainly, yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Or life, let's say just life, life of all kinds of forms or organisms. You know what? Just even the intelligence of organisms-
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- 46:29 – 49:01
Origin of ideas
- LFLex Fridman
Peter, where do ideas come from and how do they take hold in society? What's, is that the nature of collaboration? Is that the basic atom of collaboration, is ideas?
- PWPeter Wang
It's not not ideas, but it's not only ideas. There's a book I just started reading called Death from a Distance. Have you heard of this?
- LFLex Fridman
No.
- PWPeter Wang
It's a really fascinating thesis, which is that humans are the only conspecific, the o- the, uh, the, the only species that can kill other members of the species from range.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
A- and maybe there's a few exceptions, but if you look in the animal world, you see, like, pronghorns butting heads, right? You see the alpha, uh, lion and the beta lion, and they take each other down.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
Humans, we developed the ability to chuck rocks at each other, and, well, at prey, but also at each other. And that means the beta male can chunk a rock at the alpha male and take them down. And w- with ver- and he, he can throw a lot of rocks, actually, miss a bunch of times, but just hit once and be good.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
So, um, this ability to actually kill members of our own species from range, without a threat of harm to ourselves, created essentially mutually assured destruction where we had to evolve cooperation. If we didn't, then if we just continued to try to do, like, "I'm the, the biggest monkey in the tribe and I'm gonna, you know, own this tribe, and you have to go," th- if we do it that way, then those tribes basically failed. And the tribes that s- that persisted and that have now given rise to the modern homo sapiens are the ones where respecting the fact that we can kill each other from a range, uh, without har- like, there's an asymmetric ability to, to snipe the leader from range, that meant that we sort of had to learn how to cooperate with each other, right? "Come back here. Don't throw that rock at me. Let's talk our differences out." (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
So violence is also part of collaboration?
- PWPeter Wang
The threat of violence, let's say. (laughs) Well, the recognition, I would s- maybe the, the better way to put it, is the recognition that we have more to gain by working together than the prisoner's dilemma of both of us defecting.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) So, uh, mutually assured destruction in all its forms is part of this idea of collaboration.
- PWPeter Wang
Well, and Eric Weinstein talks about our nuclear peace, right? I mean, it kind of sucks that we have thousands of warheads aimed at each other, you know, in Russia and the US, but it's like, on the other hand, you know, we only fought proxy wars, right? We did not have another World War III of, like, hundreds of millions of people dying to, like, machine gun fire and, and, you know, giant, you know, guided missiles.
- LFLex Fridman
So the original nuclear weapon is, is a rock that we learned how to throw, essentially?
- PWPeter Wang
The original, yeah, well, the original scope of the world, for any human being, was their little tribe.... I would say it still is to the most, for the most part. (laughs)
- 49:01 – 54:00
Eric Weinstein
- PWPeter Wang
- LFLex Fridman
Eric Weinstein speaks very highly of you, which is very surprising to me at first 'cause I didn't know there's this depth to you, 'cause I knew you as a- as a- as an- an amazing leader of engineers and an engineer yourself, and so on. So it's fascinating.
- PWPeter Wang
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Maybe just as a comment, a- a side tangent that we can take, uh, what's your, nature of your friendship with Eric Weinstein? How did the two-
- PWPeter Wang
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
... how did such two interesting paths cross? Is it your origins in physics? Is it your interest in philosophy and the ideas of how the world works?
- PWPeter Wang
Yeah. Uh-
- LFLex Fridman
What is it?
- PWPeter Wang
It's actually, it's very random. It's, uh, Eric found me. Um, he actually found Travis, uh, and- and I. Um-
- LFLex Fridman
Travis Oliphant.
- PWPeter Wang
... Oliphant, yeah. We were both working at a company called Enthought, uh, back in the mid 2000s, and were doing, um, a lot of consulting around scientific Python. Um, and we'd made some- some tools, and, uh, Eric was trying to use some of these Python tools to visualize, that he had a fiber bundle approach to, uh, modeling certain aspects of economics. He was doing this and that, and that's how he kind of got in touch with us. And so, um-
- LFLex Fridman
This was in the early aughts, you said?
- PWPeter Wang
This was in the mid- mid 2000s. Uh-
- LFLex Fridman
Mid 2000s.
- PWPeter Wang
Uh, uh, '07 timeframe, '06, '07 timeframe.
- LFLex Fridman
Eric Weinstein trying to use Python-
- PWPeter Wang
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
... to visualize fiber bundles.
- PWPeter Wang
To visualize fiber bundles, uh, using some of the tools that were, that we had built in the open source. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
That's somehow entertaining to me, the thought of that.
- PWPeter Wang
(laughs) It's pretty funny. It was pretty funny. But then, um, you know, we met with him a couple times, really interesting guy, and then in the wake of the '07, '08 kind of financial collapse, he, uh, helped organize with Lee Smolin, um, a symposium at the Perimeter Institute about, um, okay, well clearly, you know, big finance can't be trusted, government's in its pockets with regulatory capture, what the F do we do? Um, and all sorts of people, Nassim Taleb was there, and, uh, Andy Lo from MIT was there, and, you know, uh, Bill Janeway. I mean, just a lot of, you know, top billing people were there, and he invited me and, uh, Travis and, uh, uh, another one of our coworkers, uh, Robert Kern, uh, who is a, anyone in the SciPy, NumPy community knows Robert. Um, really great guy. So the three of us also got invited to go to this thing, and that's where I met Bret Weinstein for the first time as well. Yeah, I knew him before he got all famous (laughs) for unfortunate reasons, I guess. But, um, but- but anyway, we, um, so we met then and kind of had a friendship, um, you know, throughout, since- since then.
- LFLex Fridman
You have a depth of thinking that, uh, kind of runs with Eric in terms of just thinking about the world deeply and thinking philosophically, and then there's Eric's interest in programming.
- PWPeter Wang
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
I actually have never, um, you know, he'll bring up programming to me-
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... quite a bit as a metaphor for stuff.
- PWPeter Wang
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
But I never kind of pushed the point of like, what's the nature of your interest in programming? I think he saw it probably as a tool-
- PWPeter Wang
Yeah, absolutely.
- LFLex Fridman
... uh, that to visualize, to explore mathematics and explore physics, but-
- 54:00 – 57:58
Human source code
- PWPeter Wang
- LFLex Fridman
Come here.
- PWPeter Wang
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
So he uses, uh, the metaphor source code sometimes to talk about physics.
- PWPeter Wang
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
We figure out our own source code. So you with a physics background, um, and, uh, somebody who's quite a bit of an expert in source code, do you think we'll ever figure out our own source code in the way that Eric means? Do you think we'll figure out the nature of reality?
- PWPeter Wang
Well, I think we're constantly working on that problem. I mean, I think we'll- we'll make more and more progress. For me, there's some things I don't really doubt too much. Like, I don't really doubt that one day we will create, um, a synthetic, maybe not f- maybe not fully in silicon, but a synthetic approach to, um, cognition that rivals, uh, the biological 20 watt computers in our heads.
- LFLex Fridman
What's cognition here? What- what-
- PWPeter Wang
Cognition-
- LFLex Fridman
Which- which aspect?
- PWPeter Wang
Perception, attention, memory, recall, asking better questions.... that, for me, is the measure of intelligence.
- LFLex Fridman
Doesn't Roomba vacuum cleaner already do that? Or do you mean... Oh, it doesn't ask questions.
- PWPeter Wang
No. I mean, I'm, no, it d- it's (laughs) . So, I mean, I have a Roomba, but it's-
- LFLex Fridman
Well, it asks questions.
- PWPeter Wang
... it's not even as smart as my cat, right? So-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. But it asks questions about, "What is this wall?" It, now, a new feature asks, "Is this poop or not?" Apparently.
- PWPeter Wang
Yes. A lot of our current cybernetic sys- it's a cybernetic system. It will go and it'll happily vacuum up some poop, right? Uh, the older generations would. Um-
- LFLex Fridman
A new one just released.
- PWPeter Wang
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Does not vacuum up the poop.
- PWPeter Wang
Okay, good. So-
- LFLex Fridman
This is a commercial for the Roomba.
- PWPeter Wang
I wonder if it still gets stuck under my first rung of my stair. Um, in any case, I- I- these cybernetic systems we have, they are mold, th- they're designed to be sent off into a relatively static environment and whatever dynamic things happen in the environment, they have a very limited capacity to respond to. A human baby, a human toddler of, you know, 18 months of age has more capacity to manage its own attention and its own capacity to make better sense of the world than the most advanced robots today. So, um, again, my cat, I think can do a better job (laughs) of, I have two, and they're both pretty clever. So I do think, though, back to my kind of original point, I think that it's not, for me, it's not question at all that we will be able to create synthetic systems that are able to do this, um, better than the hu- at an equal level or better than the human mind. It's also, for me, not a question that we will be able to, um, put them alongside humans so that they capture the full broad spectrum of what we are seeing as well and also looking at our responses, listening to our responses, even maybe measuring certain vital signs about us. So in this kind of sidecar mode, a greater intelligence could use us and our, whatever, 80 years of life to train itself up and then be a very good simulacrum of us moving forward, right?
- LFLex Fridman
So what, uh, so who is in the sidecar in that picture of the future exactly? Is it a human?
- PWPeter Wang
The- the ba- the baby version of our immortal selves.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay, so once the baby grows up, is there any use for humans?
- PWPeter Wang
I think so. I think that out of hu- out of epistemic humility, we need to keep humans around for a long time. And I would hope that anyone making those systems would believe that to be true.
- LFLex Fridman
Out of epistemic humility. What- what's the nature of the humility that...
- PWPeter Wang
That we don't know what we don't know.
- LFLex Fridman
So we don't... (laughs) .
- 57:58 – 1:12:16
Love
- PWPeter Wang
- LFLex Fridman
Is it possible to create an AI system that you fall in love with and it falls in love with you and you have a romantic relationship with it, or a deep friendship, let's say?
- PWPeter Wang
I would hope that that is the design criteria for any of these systems.
- LFLex Fridman
I-
- PWPeter Wang
If we cannot have a meaningful relationship with it, then it's still just a chunk of silicon.
- LFLex Fridman
So then what is meaningful? Because, um, back to Sugar.
- PWPeter Wang
Well, Sugar doesn't love you back, right? So the computer has to love you back. And what does love mean? Well, in this context, for me, love, I'm gonna take a page from Alain de Botton, love means that it wants to help us become the best version of ourselves.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- PWPeter Wang
Um...
- LFLex Fridman
That's- that's beautiful. I, that's a beautiful definition of love. So what- what role does love play in the human condition at the individual level and at the group level? 'Cause you were kind of saying that humans, we should really consider humans both at the individual and the group and the societal level.
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
What's the role of love in this whole thing? We talked about sex, we talked about death-
- PWPeter Wang
(laughs) .
- LFLex Fridman
... thanks to the bacteria that invented it. At which point did we invent love, by the way? I mean, is that- is that also...
- PWPeter Wang
No, I think- I think love is- is the- the start of it all. And the feelings of, and this gets- this is sort of beyond, uh, just, you know, romantic, sensual, whatever kind of things, but actually genuine love as we have for another person, love as it would be used in a religious text, right? I think that capacity to feel love more than consciousness, that is the universal thing. Our feeling of love is actually a sense of that generativity. When we can look at another person and see that they can be something more than- than they are and more than just what we, you know, a- a pigeonhole we might stick them in. We see, I mean, I think there's, in any religious text, you'll find, um, voiced some concept of this, that you should see the grace of God in the other person-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
... right? You, th- they're- they're made in the spirit of- of what, you know, th- the love that God feels for his creation or her creation. And so I think this thing is actually the root of it. So I would say before, I- I don't think- I don't think molecules of water feel consciousness or have consciousness, but there is some proto micro quantum thing of love that's the generativity, um, when there's more energy than what they need to maintain equilibrium. And that, when you sum it all up, is something that leads to... I mean, I- I had my mind blown one day a- as an undergrad at the physics computer lab. I logged in and, you know, uh, when you log into Bash for a long time, there was a little fortune that would come out and it said, "Man was created by water to carry itself uphill." And I was logging in to work on some, you know, problem set, and I logged in and I saw that and I just said, "Son of a bitch." You know, I just, I logged out-
- LFLex Fridman
Ugh.
- PWPeter Wang
... I went to the coffee shop (laughs) and I got a coffee and I sat there on the quad and like, "You know-"
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) .
- PWPeter Wang
"... it's not wrong, and yet, WTF, right?" (laughs) Um, so when you look at it that way, it's like, yeah, okay, non-equilibrium physics is a thing.Um, and so when we think about love, when we think about these kinds of things, um, uh, I would say that in the modern day human condition, there's a lot of talk about freedom and individual liberty and rights and all these things, but that's a- and that's very Hegelian, it's very kind of following from the Western philosophy of- of the- the individual as- as sacrosanct, but it's not really couched in, I think, the- the right way, because it should be how do we maximize people's ability to love each other, to love themselves first, to love each other, their responsibilities to the previous generation, to the future generations. Those are the kinds of things that should be our design criteria, right? Those should be what we start with to then come up with the philosophies of self and of rights and responsibilities. Um, but that- that love being at the center of it, I think when we design systems for cognition, um, it- it should absolutely be built that way. I think if we simply focus on efficiency and productivity, these kind of very, uh, industrial era, um, you know, all- all the things that Marx had issues with, right? Those, that's- that's a way to go and- and really, I think, go off the deep end in the wrong way.
- LFLex Fridman
So one of the interesting consequences of thinking of life in this hierarchical way of an individual human and then there's groups and there's societies, is, um, I believe that you believe that corporations are people.
- PWPeter Wang
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
So this is a, this is a kind of a politically dense idea and all those kinds of things. If we just throw politics aside, if we throw all of that aside-
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... in which sense do you believe that corporations are people?
- PWPeter Wang
So, um-
- LFLex Fridman
And how does love connect to that?
- PWPeter Wang
Right. (laughs) So the belief is that groups of people have some kind of higher level, I would say, mesoscopic claim to agency. I- I, you know, so- so where do I, you know, let's- let's start with this. Most people would say, okay, individuals have claims to agency and sovereignty. Nations, we certainly act as if nations, so at a very large, large scale, nations have rights to sovereignty and agency. Like, everyone plays the game of modernity as if that's true, right? We believe France is a thing, we believe the United States is a thing. But to say that groups of people at a smaller level than that, um, like a family unit is a thing. Well, in our law, in our laws, we actually do en- encode this concept. Uh, I believe that, um, in a relationship, in a marriage, right, one partner can sue for loss of consortium, right? If someone breaks up the- the marriage or- or whatever. So these are concepts that even in law, we do respect that there is something about the union and about the family. So for me, I don't think it's so weird to think that groups of people have a right to... a- a claim to rights and- and sovereignty of some degree. I mean, we, and we- we, uh, l- look at our clubs, we look at churches. These are, we- we talk about these collectives of people as if they have a- a real agency to them. And- and they do. But I think if we take that one step further and say, okay, they can accrue resources, well, yes, check, you know, and by law they can, um, they can own land, they can, uh, engage in contracts, they can do all these different kinds of things. So we, in legal terms, uh, support this idea that groups of people have rights. Um, where we go wrong on this stuff is that the most popular version of this is the for-profit absentee owner corporation that then is able to amass larger resources than anyone else in the landscape, anything else, any other entity of equivalent size, and they're able to essentially bully around individuals, whether it's laborers, whether it's people whose resources they want to capture. They're also able to bully around our system of representation, which is still tied to individuals, right? So, um, I don't believe that's correct. I don't think it's good that they, th- you know, they're people, but they're assholes. I don't think that corporations as people acting like assholes is a good thing, but the idea that collectives and collections of people that we should treat them philosophically as having some-
- LFLex Fridman
Agency.
- 1:12:16 – 1:25:39
AI
- LFLex Fridman
Well, don't you think that AI systems could be an addition to Dunbar's number? So like, why-
- PWPeter Wang
Do you count as one system or multiple AI systems?
- LFLex Fridman
Multiple AI systems.
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
So I do believe that AI systems, for them to integrate into human society as it is now, have to have a sense of agency. So there has to be a-
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... an individual, because otherwise we wouldn't relate to them.
- PWPeter Wang
We could engage certain kinds of individuals to make sense of them for us and be almost like, did you ever watch, uh, Star Trek? Uh, like Voyager, like there's the Volta who were like the interfaces, the, the ambassadors for the Dominion. Um, we may have, uh, ambassadors that speak on behalf of these systems. They're like the, the Mentats of Dune maybe, or something like this. I mean, we already have this to some extent-... if you look at the biggest sort of, I wouldn't say AI system, but the biggest cybernetic system in the world is the financial markets. It runs outside of any individual's control and you have an entire stack of people on Wall Street, Wall Street analysts, to CNBC reporters, whatever, they're all helping to communicate, "What does this mean?" You know, we got Jim Cramer, like, running around and yelling stuff. Like, all of these people are part of that lowering of the complexity there to meet sense, you know, to help do sense-making for people at whatever capacity they're at. And I don't see this changing with AI systems. I- I think you would have ringside commentators talking about all this stuff that this AI system is trying to do over here and over here, 'cause it's a, it's actually a super intelligence. So if you want to talk about humans interfacing, making first contact with a super intelligence, we're already there. We do it pretty poorly, and if you look at the gradient of power and money, what happens is the people closest to it will absolutely exploit their distance for, um, personal financial gain.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
So w- we should look at that and be like, "Oh, well, that's probably what the future will look like as well." But, um, but nonetheless, I mean, we're already doing this kind of thing, so in the future, we can have AI systems, but you're still gonna have to trust people to bridge the sense-making gap to them.
- LFLex Fridman
See, I don't... I- I just feel like there could be a, like millions of AI systems that have, um, have agency. So you have...
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
When you say one super intelligence, super intelligence in that context means it's able to, uh, solve particular problems extremely well. But there's some aspect of human-like intelligence that's necessary to be integrated into human society. So not financial markets, not sort of weather prediction systems or, I don't know, logistics, optimization. I'm more referring to things that you interact with on the intellectual level.
- PWPeter Wang
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
And that, I think, requires... There has to back story. There has to be a personality. I believe it has to fear its own mortality in a genuine way. Like, there has to be all... S- many of the elements that we humans experience that are fundamental to the human condition, 'cause otherwise we would not have a deep connection with it.
- PWPeter Wang
Mm-hmm. But I don't think having a deep connection with it is necessarily going to stop us from building a thing that has quite an alien intelligence aspect to it.
- LFLex Fridman
Sure.
- PWPeter Wang
Um, so another, now the other kind of alien intelligence on this planet is the octopuses or oco- octopodes or whatever you want to call them.
- LFLex Fridman
Octopi.
- PWPeter Wang
Octopi. Yeah. There's a, there's a little controversy as to what the plural is, I guess. But, um-
- LFLex Fridman
I- I- I look forward to your letters.
- PWPeter Wang
An octopus... (laughs) An octopus, um, you know, it really acts as a collective intelligence of eight intelligent arms, right? Its arms have a tremendous amount of neural density to them, and I see, if we can build... I mean, just let- let's go with what you're saying. If we build a- a singular intelligence that interfaces with humans that has a sense of agency so it can run the cybernetic loop and develop its own theory of mind as well as it's o- theory of action, all these... I agree with you that that's the necessary components to build a real intelligence, right? There's gotta be something at stake. It's gotta make a decision. It's gotta then run the OODA loop. Okay, so we build one of those. Well, if we can build one of those, we can probably build five million of them. So build five million of them, and if their cognitive systems are already digitized and already kind of there-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- PWPeter Wang
... we stick an antenna on each of them, bring it all back to a hive mind that maybe doesn't make all the individual decisions for them but treats each one as almost like a neural, neuronal input at a much higher bandwidth and fidelity going back to a central system that is then able to perceive much broader, uh, dynamics that we can't see. In the same way that a phased-array radar, right? You think about how a phased-array radar works. It's just sensitivity. It's just radars and then it's hyper-sensitivity and really great timing between all of them. And with a flat array, it's as good as a curved radar dish, right? So with these things, it's a phased-array of cybernetic systems that'll give the centralized intelligence a much, much better, much higher fidelity understanding of what's actually happening in the environment.
Episode duration: 2:46:40
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode X0-SXS6zdEQ
Get more out of YouTube videos.
High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.
Add to Chrome