Tomaso Poggio: Brains, Minds, and Machines | Lex Fridman Podcast #13

The following is a conversation with Tomaso Poggio. He's a professor at MIT, and is a director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. Cited over 100,000 times, his work has had a profound impact on our understanding of the nature of intelligence in both biological and artificial neural networks. He has been an advisor to many highly impactful researchers and entrepreneurs in AI, including Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, Amnon Shashua of Mobileye, and Christof Koch of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. This conversation is part of the MIT course on artificial general intelligence, and the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter, @LexFridman, spelled F-R-I-D. And now, here's my conversation with Tomaso Poggio. You've mentioned that in your childhood, you've developed a fascination with physics, especially the theory of relativity, and that Einstein was also a childhood hero to you. What aspect of Einstein's genius, the nature of his genius, do you think was essential for discovering the theory of relativity?

You know, Einstein was, uh, a hero to me, and I'm sure to many people, because he was able to make, uh, uh, of course, a major, major contribution to physics with, simplifying a bit, just a gedanken experiment, a thought experiment.

Mm-hmm.

You know, imagining, uh, communication with lights between a stationary observer and somebody on a train.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, I thought that, um, you know, the, the, the, the fact that just with the force of y- of his thought, of his thinking, of his mind, it could get to some- something so deep in term of physical reality, how time depend on space and speed, is, was something absolutely fascinating. It was the power of intelligence, the power of the mind.

Do you think the ability to imagine, to visualize as he did, as a lot of great physicists do, do you think that's in all of us human beings? Or is there something special to that one particular human being?

I think, uh, you know, a- all of us can learn and have, uh, in principle similar b- breakthroughs. Uh, there is lesson to be learned from Einstein. Uh, he was one of five PhD students at ETH, uh, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in, uh, Zurich, in physics, and he was the worst of the five. The only one who d- did not get an academic position when, uh, he, he graduated, when he finished his PhD, and he went to work, as everybody knows, for the patent office. And so it's not so much that he worked for the patent office, but the fact that obviously he was smart, but he was not a top student. O- obviously, he was the anticonformist, he was not thinking in the traditional way that probably his teachers and the other students were doing. So there is a lot to be said about, uh, you know, trying to be... to do the opposite or something quite different from what other people are doing. That's certainly true for the stock market. Never...