Joe Rogan | Artificial Life vs. Artificial Intelligence w/Lex Fridman

You sometimes say artificial life instead of artificial intelligence. Yeah, because I think that it's a life form. It's a stupid way to look at it. I was curious to think about how do you think about artificial intelligence. What do you picture? I picture human beings being like electronic caterpillars that are building a cocoon that they have no real knowledge of or understanding. And through this, a new life form is going to emerge. A life form that doesn't need cells and mating with X and Y chromosomes, doesn't need any of that shit. It exists purely in software and in hardware and in ones and zeros and that this is a new form of life. This is when the inevitable rise of the sentient being, the inevitable, I mean, I think if we don't get hit when an asteroid within a thousand years or whatever the time frame is, someone is going to figure out how to make a thing that just walks around and does whatever it wants and lives like a person. That's not outside the realm of possibility. And I think that if that does happen, that's artificial life and this is the new life and it's probably going to be better than what we are. I mean, what we are is basically if you go back and look about, you know, 300,000, 400,000 years ago when we were some Australia pithicus type creature, how many of them would ever look at the future and go, I hope I never get a Tesla. The last thing I want is a fucking phone. The last thing I want is air conditioning and television. The last thing I want is to be able to talk in a language that other people can understand and to be able to call people on the phone. Fuck all that, man. I like living out here running from jaguars and shit and constantly getting jacked by bears, you know? No, I wouldn't think that way. And I think if something comes out of us and makes us obsolete, but it's missing all the things that suck about people. I mean, it won't be good. It won't be good in our things suck about people. Hate, war, violence, thievery, people stealing things from people, people robbing people. Here's the thing. Those dark parts of human nature, I think are suffering, injustice. I think all of that is necessary for us to discover the better angels. I don't think you can, we can talk, let's talk about St. John's and creating artificial life, but I think even those life forms, even those systems need to have the darker parts. But why is that? Is that because of our own biological limitations and the fact that we exist in this world of animals where animals are eating other animals and running. You always have to prepare for evil. You have to prepare for intruders. You have to prepare for predators. And this is essentially like this mechanism is there to ensure that things don't get sloppy. Things continue to evolve. Look, if the jaguars keep eating the people and the people don't figure out how to make a fucking house, they get eaten and that's it. Or you figure out the house and then you make weapons, you fight off the fucking jaguar. Okay, great. You made it. You're in a city now. See, you had to have that jaguar there in order to inspire you to make enough safety so that your kids can grow old enough that they can get information from all the people that did survive as well and they can accumulate all that information and create air conditioning and automobiles and guns and keep those fucking jaguars from eating your kids. Right? This is what had to take place as a biological entity. But once you surpass that and once you become this thing that doesn't need emotion, doesn't need, you know, doesn't need conflict, it doesn't need to be inspired, it never gets lazy. It doesn't have these things that we have built into us as a biological system. Like if you looked at us as wetware operating software, it's not good software, right? It's software designed for cave people and we're, you know, we're just trying to force it into cars and force it into cubicles. But part of the problem with people and their unhappiness is that all of these human reward systems that have been set up through evolution and natural selection to have these instincts to stay alive, they're no longer relevant in today's society. So they become road rage, they become, you know, extracurricular violence, they become depression, they become all these different things that people suffer from. So that's one perspective. Yes. That basically our software through this evolutionary process was necessary to arrive at where we are but it's outdated at this point. Well, it's necessary for us to succeed. To succeed in a purely, almost a Darwinist way in a sense that survived the revolution. Especially since we're so weak. I mean, it's really, we became this weak because we got so good at protecting ourselves from all the bad things. Yep. Okay, the other perspective is that we're actually incredibly strong and this is the best that the universe can create actually. We're at the height. This is, we're at the height of creation. There's a beauty in this tension and this dance between good and evil, between like happiness and depression, life and death. And that through that struggle, that's not just a useful tool to get us from jaguars to cities, but that is the beautiful thing that, that is like what the universe was built for. That is the height, like our current, the evolution and the creation that results from it is the height of creation. Thank you.