Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes | Lex Fridman Podcast #87

The following is a conversation with Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, The Magic of Reality, and The Greatest Show of Earth, and his latest, Outgrowing God. He is the originator and popularizer of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and science in general, including, funny enough, the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, which, in the context of a gene-centered view of evolution, is an exceptionally powerful idea. He's outspoken, bold, and often fearless in the defense of science and reason, and in this way is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. This conversation was recorded before the outbreak of the pandemic. For everyone feeling the medical, psychological, and financial burden of this crisis, I'm sending love your way. Stay strong. We're in this together. We'll beat this thing. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience. This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LEXPODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App allows you to send and receive money digitally peer to peer, security in all digital transactions is very important. Let me mention the PCI data security standard that Cash App is compliant with. I'm a big fan of standards for safety and security. PCI DSS is a good example of that, where a bunch of competitors got together and agreed that there needs to be a global standard around the security of transactions. Now we just need to do the same for autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence systems in general. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use the code LEXPODCAST, you get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Richard Dawkins. Do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?

Well, if we accept that there's intelligent life here (laughs) and we accept that the number of planets in the universe is gigantic, I mean, 10 to the 22 stars has been estimated, it seems to me highly likely that there is not only life in the universe elsewhere, but also intelligent life. If you deny that, then you're committed to the view that the things that happened on this planet are staggeringly improbable. I mean, ludicrously, off the charts improbable, and I don't think it's that improbable. Certainly the origin of life itself, there are really two steps. The origin of life, which is probably fairly improbable, and then the subsequent evolution to intelligent life, which is also fairly improbable. So the juxtaposition of those two you could say is pretty improbable, but not 10 to the 22 improbable. It's an interesting question, maybe you're coming onto it, how we would recognize intelligence from outer space if we, if we encountered it. The most likely way we would come across them would be by radio. It's highly unlikely they'd ever visit us. But, um, it's not, it's not that unlikely that we would pick up radio signals, and then we would have to have some means of deciding that it was intelligent. Um, people have w- people involved in the SETI program discuss how they would do it, and things like prime numbers would be an obvious thing to... and obvious, an obvious way for them to broadcast, to say, "We are intel- intelligent. We are here." Um, I suspect it probably would be obvious, actually.