factory floor sounds. more harassers says a 2nd 1000 prisoner seizure of rifles joins the. massive laugh investor in physics at mit and president of the future of lab in a city that thanks for being with us today as i said half of that but let's start with the fundamentals. our mathematical universe you've put forth an argument that mathematics. whole universe that is basically made a math when you say that our reality is mathematics and mathematics isn't just an explanation of our reality what exactly do you mean and i don't have numbers it sounds completely crazy you know when you 1st hear this claim that everything is all mathematical it was i look around myself in the room you know and. what is there that's mathematical about this you know i don't see this for something to be completely mathematical it means that it has only mathematical properties so i have

this little toy i'm teaching a course about astronomy if i ask what's the properties of this it's fluffy it's kind of beige. seems to be the non-mathematical right but when i look at this with my eyes the physicists i see a big blob of electrons and core. and what are are these properties of these elementary particles that everything is made of well the electron has the property minus 1. 1 half one and so on i we physicists have made up nerdy names for these properties like the electric charge for the spin on the left one number. we humans made up those names the properties are just the numbers and in fact the only difference between an electron and a proton are and or a photon or any other particle that we have around us in the universe is which

numbers its properties are moreover this space that everything is in. what properties the space have actually well it has this property 3 that's the biggest number of figures i can put that are all perpendicular to each other we call it the mention ality of space but it's again just a number and in fact the only properties that we physicists so far have been able to the star are either about space itself or about in the midst of in space are mathematical at the fundamental level so if you do if you take that perspective it starts to sound a little bit less crazy that maybe. it is ultimately. a completely mathematical universe mathematical object that we're in a little bit like if you're in a computer game you know you would eventually discover that all the properties of how things move in your computer game are mathematical because those were the rules

that were programmed into it and if you were living in a computer game you might think oh it's a future computer game where it's so advanced that you feel conscious and stuff you might think oh i'm real i have a real body. but actually it would be all mathematical. and very precise science and so is everything in our universe is no matter who's does that mean that we can theoretically precisely calculate anything well the famous physicist neils bohr once made this joke that in theory theory and practice are the same practice they're not so in. my guess is that in we in theory everything can be calculated but in practice we certainly cannot if there are many cases even today when we actually have already we think very more or less the right equations to study something for example there

are there is something called quantum chromodynamics which we believe really describes everything you need to know that to compute all of chemistry the whole periodic table mandalay have discovered and so on just from. pure math but we can't do it yet because the calculations are too hard and there are huge super computer simulations being run right out of sort do it more accurately so even if we were to discover the correct fundamental mathematical description it's not like all will be unemployed. theoretical physicists and many of them told me that there's a great deal of chance and how nature were. like i don't know. how can that be reconciled with your mathematical deterred more determined

that the universe. that's a really good question and we realized of course over a 100 years ago that. things appear to be random sometimes. in physics because of what we call quantum mechanics and 100 years later. scientists around the world are still arguing bitterly about what this means some people think this means that something actually random happens from time to time when somebody looks at something and observes it and others think that's just. nonsense and that's nothing random is happening and i had to actually belong to the 2nd camp but i'm not alone i mean even einstein. famously said that he doesn't believe the dog plays dice. that if you look more carefully at this. there was the basic theory that of course the sort of master key of quantum mechanics is called assured in your equation that's an equation mathematical equation which

describes how reality today predicts reality in the future and the funny thing is it pretty it talks about a bigger reality actually than the one we can observe where maybe there is that there's one branch you know where you're pregnant now and another one where you already had a baby 2 years ago and they're all they can all be equally real and if you take the point of view that the actual reality is bigger and there are all these different versions of. life playing out in sort of in parallel then there's actually nothing random happening at all but if you want to get rid of all that extra reality because you feel it's too much just too weird then you can try to introduce this extra postulate that once in a while something actually random happens that maybe picks out only one of the versions what i love about this is it's not just a loss of faith because right now we're investing around the world massive amounts

of money to try to build quantum computers. and. they will ultimately only work at large scale if. these random things truly don't happen . as they sat in school i was taught that to power lines never crossed and then i found out that when i see a lot of machines mathematicians were allowed to cross so fast is the language of the union fers help through change when you see say. it's a very interesting question so. mathematics. is really the study of different kinds of abstract structures and you can describe the formulas they symbolically and there are many many different ones and we thought we

knew that earlier the only kind of space that we thought that existed euclidean space where lines never to paralyze never crossed turns out by now mathematicians have discovered that there are all sorts of other different spaces something that sometimes paralyze for us twice francis and it becomes an experimental question to figure out of all of these structures which exist mathematically which is the one that we live in for example it turns out that the kind of space we live in is not that old try and that euclid thought but much more interesting fact. what does saying the fabric of the universe as a mass give us. so i mean it's just optimism that we will actually be able to understand our universe even better than we once thought you know in ancient times we were almost resigned that we would never understand most of the world and then we discovered that some parts of it were mathematical you could predict how the things would move in

a certain shape you know why was that squared a parabola ellipse and then we got the math and describe light and magnetism and electricity. subatomic particles if if my guess is correct that it's all mathematical then that means that we have the potential as human to ultimately be able to understand at least in principle everything which i think is inspiring. so i started out more earthly matters because the latest the key ready is actually concerned with more earthly battersea share of artificial intelligence is america. as you say the problem with ai that doesn't really comprehend what humans are and how our world is functioning how do you explain to a robot well this world is a bot. yeah of 1st of all is a fascinating connection between what we just talked about with math because.

gradually more and more of the world around us has become explainable by science with mathematics right and the sort of last bastion is trying to understand what is intelligence and consciousness and a core idea artificial intelligence is that even intelligence itself can be described with mathematics mathematics i think you know it is information processing and. when we watch movies and about ai i think they typically make us worry about the wrong thing they make us worry about robots turning evil but the real threat of advanced artificial intelligence is not that it turns evil but just that it turns very competent and has goals that are not aligned with our goals for example do you hate ads like if you're working on the street and you see it and you're going to go in like step on it on purpose. i didn't think so so it's like a nice person but suppose suppose you're in charge of building

a new green energy plan. and just because before you're going to flood this valley with water you see that there's an ant hill in the middle what he wanted to. get exactly so you. it's not that you paid for that but you had different goals that were not aligned with i was away at so too bad for the ads right so we want to make sure if we ever create machines that are much smarter than our us and more powerful than us that their goals are aligned with our goals so that we don't become some because they're going to get their way because they're just so competent i place really active i was to actually tell them what their goal is right there it's right it's a case of how the impact of the drug data all this is held and what don't go away when he takes strength or not do we need to explain to them how the world works you know better to explain to them what the goals are these are 2 separate things we don't need to make explain anything about how our will function is just sound and

they're both. we we certainly need to explain a bit about the what if you want them you know you're going to have a child right and you're not going to be able that teach them to be a good person if you don't teach them anything about how the world works but eventually you'll become grow up and become stronger than you probably right chad will live born with a with a consciousness something that the everyone will never happen consciousness is what really makes a human and he intuition we understand how to function in the world and how will function. that's a very controversial question that people love to argue about you know whether consciousness is only possible in biological organisms like humans or whether it's something to do with information processing they could also happen in machines but in either case you know that there are also humans who are conscious you still do very bad things right. that's why i'm confident that your son is going to go up and do good things because you as a mother are going to make sure that you don't just teach them about the world but

also instill in them good goals and i think we're not doing a good job with that today with our computers for example. there was a german pilot who flew it told as auto pilot on his airplane just fly into the alps and it just said ok and it did and this german ways that aircraft crashed and over 100 people died nobody had bother teaching this auto pilot just never fly into fixed object so i lasted until he should break right now when we're back or continue to maximize our professor of physics and president of that he should. jump in iraqi mathematics actually he her self-esteem the best.

for people america no representation of government that's the problem there's nobody in government that represents people who are not part of a multimillionaire lobbying who work for banks who print money for themselves. to the consultants in this year printing money for the beginning from the until the fact you have nobody in government representing in america not a single congressperson not a single senator nobody in the white house represents you you are on your own. i knew you would buy a big one for 10 years like we've been saying and you 2 would have $101520000000.00 even if you started with 5 or $6000.00. americans love buying homes.

this was a fundamental part of how our political leadership and our country at large understood the bargain you get a home and then you know rebel right as the things you don't revolt if you have a stake in the system. be really interesting to dial it back and think about the longer deeper history housings men in the united states not just that question of the american dream but the bigger question if you the dream is for. rather than max tegmark professor of physics and t.

and president of the future laugh and see. what it's all about your concept of life for you ok so i say flat one point. microorganism of which are concerned will surface sulfur implication and life 2.0 or 2 is basically humans who can influence terri vironment the program that life 3.31 for you is artificial intelligence trained and able to overcome the illogical constraints bed can a clever rubber really be seen as a lie heavy duty a no cells and later when mentioned. consciousness yeah well. we have to be humble and acknowledge we don't know exactly what consciousness is what makes us experience things subject away but. through all of the at 8 yeah ok as we we know for sure that not having

a let's roll itself because we know we've been wondering ok might my guess is that . both intelligence and consciousness actually are all about information processing and i consider it a carbon charge and as i'm this idea that you can only be smart and conscious if you're made of carbon atoms. and. i think my suspicion is that what really matters is if the information is processed in certain very complex ways that we don't particularly understand yet and that. it doesn't matter whether you're made of silicon are carbon have cells or not to me the basic essence of life is that you have a process that can maintain its complexity and make copies of itself and the basic . essence of intelligence is simply that you can accomplish goals the better you are at accomplishing goals the more intelligent you are and so i think that if we can make machines are much more intelligent by that definition than us it's either

going to be the best thing ever happen to humanity or the worst and i'm very excited about you what can we do now things. in a good direction. and society sometimes it's hard to push it would something if they're not going to as free health care or equal rats fan base is the one that you see for any society to make an even more drastic step towards. turn all decision making over. it's obviously hard which is why we have so many problems on this planet right but we also. have seen a lot of examples of that how we can make progress you know if we were having this conversation. 30000 years ago we are probably both be dead because life expectancy was very short back then and now. because of technology we've figured out how to

live a longer healthier and wealthier lives and we've also done together as a society. particularly after world war 2 and tried to use a lot of technology that actually helped. everybody get better off right and with the many countries there there's free health care for university education and so on so the potential is there if we can use artificial intelligence but ultimately figure out how to cure all diseases and produce. and take care all the everything that everybody needs to be able to live happy and this buying lives not that would be wonderful but if we instead use artificial intelligence like we very much do today i think in the media system around the world like the manipulate people into hating each other and hating each other not just between different countries but also within different countries and all these ever more fragmented groups. that of course is not

a good thing and in fact i'm working very much right now in this research project where we're using artificial intelligence exactly to see how do we take some of the methods for figuring out the truth that we use in science and better exploit them into the media so that we as a species can just. get along better at by having a shared understanding of what's actually happening ok so let's talk about what they said they improve the news for you you have to go in wired with say how. do you see it can be tweaked according to political bias should have been a problem we have now says in people to other points of view why does it take and i to do a simple thing like that. good question so if you go to improve the news work that's a little nonprofit the website we set up. which has

a new input news on it right now as you mentioned. if you. need humans to read it all of these many many many thousands of articles every day and then classify them in different ways you know you would need a lot of money for it so i couldn't do it you know it's just an academic professor if you have artificial intelligence classifying all the articles what a manically. then it becomes basically free so you can have it for free with no ads today artificial intelligence is used already very heavily in media by all the social media companies for example but mainly not to classify the news but they classify you the reader because their goal is to simply make you spend as much time as possible watching advertising so they can maximize their profit right so they will look at you and everything you clicked on before and make a very detailed model of you and see how can we get you. to click click click here

and then these algorithms have discovered of course that one of the best ways to hook people is to make them angry to trigger their emotions and to tell them things that feed their prejudices and even though the original goal of this was just to make money i think the result has been quite catastrophic where we now have parallel universes appearing here on earth basically in the media landscape where you have all these different people even different people i know and here right who are living in effectively in parallel universes and don't read the same news they have completely different understandings of what's even happening they can kind of meaningful conversation and i think if we're going to have a healthy democracy it's very important that we are living in the same universe and to have and that you know it's hard to figure out what the truth is really hard. if it weren't so hard we wouldn't need science right we could just point the fact

checking committee. the run by some companies or governments telling us what the truth is that we scientists we fought for hundreds of years against that stuff right like imagine if they if galileo put out a tweet saying oh earth is actually orbiting the sun. and then pope urban search i think you maybe said you know no this is misinformation it's not true you know we fought against that sort of stuff so hard as scientists and i think because of that we really have something as a scientific community we can add to to society around the world yet help people find their way and figure out what's actually going on ok that rather more profitable now. can an artificial intelligence been trusted to break me bad data or is it team leaking out to truly get the meaning of balance in me you

know fox calls themselves balance artificial intelligence no they're not we should certainly not trust any algorithms just because someone tells us to trust them to i want my favorite quotes by einstein is is that. the blind faith and authority is the greatest enemy of truth you know and to me the whole essence of being a scientist is that i would rather have you know questions i can't answer than answers i can't question so you know we should never trust anything we should have a healthy skepticism towards everything so the point of the prove the news dot org project is not tell people oh don't trust those guys trust this out this is the truth no no no this is rather simply a tool to try to empower ordering people to. see all the evidence more clearly so they can make up their own mind if you're

reading about some typical controversial issue and it's very nice if you can now just by moving a little slider say ok what are people saying out on this side of the conflict on that side of the conflict and then make up your own mind it's kind of like you know we all have friends who. after you got divorced or ended our relationship right and we know that if you were to talk to only one of the 2 people about what went wrong you tend to get a sort of biased version of the story right but if you can talk to both people about why they broke up you can usually piece together a much more nuanced understanding of what actually happened right. it's the same i believe with very many geopolitical and national controversies as well that if you give people the opportunity to hear both sides or all signs. they will themselves come up with a more trustworthy interpretation that what's happening that's the idea. for this wonderful insight all the best of luck with your research and i mean maybe

you should do this in one or 2 years time to see where we act with the at that point. with the. basic facts. and good luck with. is your media a reflection of reality. in

a world transformed. what will make you feel safe. isolation community. are you going the right way or are you being so. direct. what is true what is faith. in a world corrupted you need to descend. to join us in the depths. aura made in the shallows. humanity has never seen such strange natural phenomena befall giant coming to us appearing in the peninsula. one off for another. was never about to pick up again you've had your say get you your boy you know whom does love we thought of it that he would be at. this one appeared in 2020.

how often and where will new crisis subpoena as i described how dangerous oen day for human the slum only it is different than 102021 russian scientists came quite close to working out what's going on. they built a full scale 3 d. model of the black hole. to the. most pathetic and dangerous consequence of the russia gate hoax is how it is bled into policy at the center of this hoax was to discredit and then finally destroy donald trump now it informs us russian relations the result is dire this bilateral relationship may never recover. i'm going to.

bring you. in the. not. thinking about it. because. you naturally. knew all. through it. all of. the. new top of that if you should get a bill be you. could be of the night.

and let them know that you. no money for food and a growing mental health crisis stuck in isolation students and friends turn in vast numbers to aid groups offering free or subsidized meals. u.k. vaccination centers fight surging numbers of fraudsters and huge jumpers as britain braces for a job drought. we're wasting slopes that could be used by. those who want to tell it's a vaccine and just slows down the vaccine program. and do as i say not as i do that's washington's principle as it tries to stymie russian energy sales to europe makes the country it's a 3rd of the biggest oil importer. we are back live next hour with my colleague kevin owen here in.