China keeps graduating more bachelor of science and bachelor of engineers than anywhere else in the world. China’s universities are pumping out more science graduates than us, but they’re not pumping out more innovators. It’s not like the students that are coming out of those universities in China with their science degrees are going off and doing innovative stuff. More

Humans have a history of conquest because we fight for the same exact resources, but even in human history the first explorers were traders. They were going out there to find spices, gold, silk, new plants to domesticate, new animals. They weren’t going out there necessarily to conquer the land. Eventually they did because of the finite resource dilemma when you’re stuck on Earth. More

I think Stephen Hawking said that it was a mistake to broadcast radio waves out into the universe because the aliens are going to be out there and they’re going to be like conquistadors. They’re going to want to take over our planet for their resources and various other things.  There’s a couple of responses you can have to the idea of evil aliens coming to get us. More

We still have this problem of what DNA was doing for that approximately two and a half billion years—the overwhelming majority of the history of life on Earth. Why didn’t it evolve at all during that time? What’s going on? There’s a book, Rare Earth, by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, and these guys talk about all the quirky things that happened in the evolutionary history of the Earth. More

These are all uncertain hypotheses, but we also have to keep in mind that there’s so much about evolution by natural selection that we don’t know. David Deutsch has this little quip, “If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it.” In the case of AGI, this means we can’t program it because we don’t understand this idea of general intelligence. More

Here’s another way to think about it that is mathematically frightening for the people who think that the aliens are out there and they’re going to visit us sometime in the future. We were talking earlier about trillions of planets that exist throughout the known universe that might even be friendly for life to arise. More

Now, that’s one argument, and we have to be humble in the face of uncertainty here because no one knows. But I want to give an argument that rarely gets any air time.  The argument is that we are alone. The argument has nothing to do with astronomy; it has everything to do with biology. More

Scientifically minded types say, “Perhaps we won’t be able to understand the next set of laws of physics. Perhaps we won’t be able to understand the aliens.” It’s nothing but the appeal to the supernatural. It’s logically equivalent to “God is out there, and you can’t possibly understand what God is. More

The artificial general intelligence crew gets it completely wrong, too:  “Just add more compute power and you’ll get intelligence,” when we don’t know what it is underneath that makes us creative and allows us to come up with good explanations. People talk a lot about GPT-3, the text-matching engine that OpenAI put out, which is a very impressive piece of software. More

You’re pointing out a minority opinion there. I think culture is still stuck in that second part of what you were saying. Originally we thought that we were at the center of the universe. This was the religious conception of man’s place in the cosmos. Earth was surrounded by the celestial spheres and everything orbited around it. More