Panel with Peter Thiel, Aubrey de Grey, Eliezer Yudkowsky

So I'm going to be talking with Peter, Eliezer, and Aubrey about basically how they've been thinking about this. So I'm going to be talking to Peter, Eliezer, and Aubrey about how they've been thinking about these issues for a long time. So when did you decide to save the world or change the world?

Well, in theory or in practice? So I think everybody, when they're a kid and growing up, has an idea that they want to do something different, do something special. And then I think I started to act on it when I became an entrepreneur in my late 20s. But I think the real question we should be asking is, why do people give up on trying to change the world?

I'll second that on the proper form of the question. I mean, once I realized that there was a problem, I don't think it ever occurred to me not to save the world. You know, I mean... uh... so what so what what point in my life uh... it it actually is a pretty difficult uh... question i mean there's the point where uh... where i sort of noticed the intelligence explosion possibility is the result of reading Vernor Vinge and realized well there's all these people dying every day that's one hundred and fifty thousand people per day it's a depressing fact and we should really change that fact uh... and then there's the there there's a later point where i realized well no it's actually not just that it's that you can actually

screw up the Singularity. It's very easy to screw up, and the entire human species stands at risk. And I can sort of understand it in an abstract way, but ultimately not really sympathize with someone who can think that their world is going to die and do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

Yeah, I have a pretty accurate, precise idea of when I came to the conclusion that I wanted to make a difference to the world, and as big a difference as possible. And it was when I discovered that I was reluctant to practice the piano at the age of nine, as my mother wanted me to. Essentially, I wanted to understand why I was reluctant, and eventually I realized that the main reason was that the best possible outcome of my spending all this time practicing the piano would be that I would become a good pianist. And what the hell was the point of that? Because there's already plenty of other good pianists. So that was what led me to realize that I wanted to make as much of a difference as possible and to become a scientist and thereafter to move into artificial intelligence for humanitarian reasons and then after that to move into gerontology when I discovered to my absolute shock that most biologists didn't think that aging was very important or very interesting.

But again, I agree with Peter that the key thing is why do people stop thinking this way? And I think, unfortunately, the answer is very boring and very simple. Namely, it's all about failure. The reason I've managed to maintain a will to aim high is ultimately because I've been aiming high for a long time and I've made modest but non-trivial progress in doing so. And it's success that breeds success and breeds enthusiasm to carry on trying. I think it's ultimately all about failure.

But couldn't someone else do it? Wouldn't that be easier?

In fact, they're not. As the saying goes, someone's got to do something and it's completely ridiculous that it has to be us. But there you go.

Well, you know, it's like the joke about the two University of Chicago economists walking down the street where one sees a $100 bill and the other one says, 'There can't be a $100 bill because there'd be an efficient market and people walking down the street picking up $100 bills.' And so obviously, if everybody thought this was a serious problem, it would be more likely that other people would be doing it. But if we're in a world where everybody thinks somebody else is going to be doing it, it's much less likely that somebody else will be doing it. And unfortunately, we're more in that second type of world than the first world.

So, Peter, I suppose you've made a career out of picking up $100 bills on the sidewalk. I once found a $20 once, but never actually found a $100. My sister found a sapphire ring, but I think, compared to Facebook, that's kind of lame.

Well, I found a $20 bill once. I haven't found a $100 bill yet. It was actually on an occasion where I was relaying this precise anecdote, so it was kind of cool. No, I think that the question of what areas people should focus on and should focus their energies on in terms of where to contribute, I think there is something to be said for trying to avoid doing things that too many other people are doing. The word "ape" simultaneously means primate and to imitate. There is something, I think, very deep about human nature that's social and imitative and sort of... And there are ways in which that's good, and a lot of, you know, a lot of good that comes out of that, but I think that, in terms of this question of where one can really push the envelope and make a difference, it's, it's important to explore areas that people are not doing, and I think it's certainly true that

Anti-aging, artificial intelligence, just about all the topics that are being discussed here, far too few people are doing. And therefore, I think these are areas where there's tremendous scope for people to make a difference in many different ways.

Yeah, I'd like to amplify on that, in, particularly, the context of science, so it probably does apply more broadly. I think, now, it's always appalled me that really, really bright scientists almost all work in the most competitive fields, the ones in which they are making the least difference. In other words, the ones in which, if they were hit by a truck, then the same discovery would be made by somebody else about 10 minutes later. I absolutely never understood that. The only sort of proto-explanation that I've ever really thought of is that it's a function of the way that we're educated, especially the way that boys tend to be educated, which places too much emphasis on competition and on getting people to be wistful for competition if they're not competing with the people that they perceive to be the other bright people.

There's no efficient market in utilons, is the way I sometimes put it, where that's from utility and, you know, it goes back to the birds example. Markets may not be perfectly efficient. They generally tend to be difficult to exploit, but that doesn't mean they're sane. But even so, there's no investment class where you know what the payoff is. The payoff is a hundred times as much, and the price goes from $80 to $88. There's no efficient market in utilons. And part of that is reflected in the entire neglect of the notion of marginal effort. The less attention something is getting, the easier it is for marginal efforts to make a difference. And what you actually have is, if I may be permitted a bit of Hansonian cynicism, status affiliation, where you congregate where the people who have the most status already are, and by giving to that

organization, you affiliate yourself with them, and so the large ones have the highest status already, you give more to them, you affiliate with a larger group of higher status people, and the actual object of the philanthropy, the people you're supposed to be helping, the goal you're trying to accomplish, especially if you dare to compare these projects. Okay, I mean, I don't want cute puppies to die, but a little less money to puppy pounds and a little more money to existential risk prevention would probably be a good decision on humanity's part, even if it tugs at our heartstrings.

So, if you hadn't ended up on aging, and if you hadn't ended up on AI, what do you think you would have ended up upon? What might be some other places to look for low-hanging fruit, places where people aren't looking for high impact, high payoffs?

Well, that's particularly hard for me to answer because before I was in aging, I was working in AI. And so I haven't had a chance to think about anything else. I've been too busy. I'm not really sure, to be perfectly honest. I mean, it seems sort of obvious that those are by far the hardest, the worst problems that humanity has. But I guess I'd probably be working on some sort of existential risk thing.

I'd probably be something in human rationality, or possibly would have ended up as a science fiction author. But I have to remind myself that it's not what's the most fun to do. It's not even what you have talent to do. It's what you need to do that you ought to be doing. And do you want to talk about Patri Friedman, who's the one who's missing from this table?

Well, I think there are many different things that one could be developing. I do think that sort of as a default, if you wanted to have a menu, I would just give you the list of science fiction books from the '50s and '60s and go through those as starting points. So the development of the oceans, development of the deserts, development of outer space, robots, nanotech, biotech, AI. You sort of go through the menu and that's probably about as good a place to start as any. But I think the thing that I very much agree with both Aubrey and Eliezer on is that there is something about the problem of the way status is measured in our society. There's something about competition that's extremely... It's good up to a certain point, but then it goes very, very badly wrong.

And I can sort of... There's an autobiographical version of this where, super-tracked, I was like a competitive chess player, and in high school it was actually, in a way, one of the things that was, was good that computers got better than the humans, and as a result, I realized this was perhaps not the best thing to be doing. But I think that there are sort of all these directions people, people get tracked into, and, you know, we should somehow discourage that. The, the, the, there's sort of my, my pet peeve of: there are too many smart people, in my opinion, who are in physics in our society. And I think that's sort of a symptom of the fact that people can excel at a very early age at things like music or chess or math or physics.

And the competitive thing then ends up tracking people towards those fields rather than to fields where it maybe takes a little bit longer to build up the skill set, but ultimately much bigger contribution could be made. And so that's, if we could get all the superstring theorists to work on anti-aging or AI, they get to choose one or the other, I think we'd make incredible progress.

Yeah, I've quipped that if Ed Witten got AIDS, we'd have a cure within a few years. A funny thing is, as Eliezer pointed out, people seem to be heavily motivated to affiliate with high-status individuals. And yet, Peter, you were playing chess, which was a lot of work, I imagine, and probably wouldn't have ended up leading you to affiliating with as high-status individuals as has actually worked out to be the case. And I think that's kind of true even with Eliezer and Aubrey. You've actually ended up being able to affiliate with pretty high-status individuals too. So it seems like the apparent cost isn't as great as it turned out to be. Any other tips for affiliating with high-status individuals?

Make a difference.

Status is very overrated. It's one of these things where if you want it, you will not actually get it. So if you want to start a successful company, you do it because you're passionate about something, but the people who try to make money generally don't make money. If you want to become a famous author and you're becoming a writer just to become famous, you won't succeed because actually writing is incredibly isolating and lonely as a process. And so I tend to think there is something about status, which is that you're most likely to achieve it if you don't actually want it. And we see this in sort of all these paradoxes where people don't want to join a club that wants to have them as a member, and so there are all these sort of weird paradoxes associated with it.

And the way I would short-circuit it is by just saying that you should just try to not focus much less on these status questions because they ultimately are sort of much less productive than people think.

Your desire for status, I mean, it might have worked fine in the ancestral environment. Today, you know, it's just rolling dice. You know, your intuitions could lead you anywhere. They could lead you to invest with Bernie Madoff, who, you know, made his money off of giving the impression that only high-status people were allowed to invest in his company. And, you know, there's so many different people trying to exploit that nowadays that if you, if you actually pay attention to those instincts, you're just going to be led straight off a cliff by someone who's making a profit on it too.

Okay, another thing of course is that, well, I think we can fairly say that we're all, Peter maybe somewhat less so, not too afraid of being weird. What rules does one have to break in order to be, what rules does one have to break in order to be high-impact, to make a real impact in the world?

Well, you've got to break the rule about caring what other people think. I mean, you can pretend to care about what people think, and you can be the sort of person who doesn't really care, but has learned to take it into account as a conscious consideration. But if you're actually paying attention on some... Paying attention is the wrong term. If there's that sort of deep stir of fear inside you, when you see someone else, when you see that other people are thinking something different or saying something different, if there's that deep stir of fear, you're probably in a lot of trouble. If you've learned to make the sort of abstract consideration of it, then you may be okay. But that sort of, what on earth am I doing?

Is there someone watching me? You have to squash that instinct within yourself.

Yeah, not caring what other people think is certainly important. Caring what you yourself think is important. Being good at introspection, being good at understanding and gravitating to a self-consistent understanding of your own values, because that helps to intensify those values and maintain one's confidence when one might be in socially challenging situations. I think that's a large part of it.

And if you try to be as weird as I am, you're probably trying too hard or setting your standards too high or something.

Yeah, you want to try to avoid being conformist, but that also means avoiding conforming to the prevailing standards of nonconformity. And so you have layers and layers of things. So again, I think I would short-circuit, do you think ahead one step, two steps, three steps, four steps, five steps? You can short-circuit all of them by just trying to think.

Yes, I call that the outside-the-box box. Whenever someone tells you to think outside the box, they will conveniently show you, for your convenience, where the outside-the-box is located. And I believe this is a major problem with venture capital, where they're all thinking in the same outside-the-box box. Except for Peter Thiel, who actually does think outside the box.

Eliezer, you mentioned being afraid of being different. I'm wondering, do you think that, do you find that fear in general or any other emotions might in general just be harmful? Is there any types of motivations that you would think of as worth cultivating? Any, especially with, in general about emotions, you tend to emphasize that rational does not mean Spock.

Yes, you know, try to feel the emotion that fits the facts. Calm is sometimes the wrong emotion to fit the facts. But to answer your particular question, I would say that the love and enjoyment of exercising power over others is, you know, I can't speak for everyone, but, you know, I've sort of seen, I saw that once within my mind and went like, eh, squish, because I knew that was evil.

Yeah, I mean, I think... I think the sorts of emotions that are good are the sorts of emotions that intensify one's conviction to try to carry on making a difference in the world. And those are, by and large, for me anyway, the positive emotions rather than the negative ones. I have the same positive emotions that regular people have, and they intensify my love of being alive and my love of wanting other people to be alive. And so those are really the sorts of things that matter most. I think negative emotions tend to be more confusing than clarifying.

Well, my very short version of this is I think things that sort of emotionally center you so that you can you can persevere on things that don't seem, you know, don't seem to be socially acceptable or desirable are, I think, quite important. And so, you know, having some way where you don't get depressed if things aren't going the right way day to day is probably really important because, you know, life is very long and we hope that it is quite a bit longer than very long in some cases.

So I think that we actually all agree on a number of things that we should probably discuss explicitly. So if I can ask Peter a question. Yes. So I know what it's like on my end when I'm sort of talking to people and trying to get them to take action on existential risks. But on your end, and in the circles you move, and I'm kind of curious as to what the experience is like on your end. How do people excuse ignoring these things, for example?

Well, for the most part, it varies in different contexts, but for the most part, they end up having way more clutter in their lives and the effect of it is that it's actually much easier for them to ignore it. And so I think one of the things that is something to be very careful of and guard against is that if you're successful by various metrics of how that's defined, is not to get trapped in a circumstance where you can no longer think originally, act freely, and thereby you sort of end up in these circumstances that make it actually harder to replicate what made you successful in the first place. So I think that tends to be a very psychosocial type of a pattern, even though in theory there should be sort of way more information, in practice, there's often just way more clutter.

If it wouldn't be too rude, I'd love if you would elaborate on that, but I think probably asking for examples might be too much.

But you're doing it anyway.

No, no, I'm giving the option.

Well, you know, I think the... Well, just to key off an example we've already cited, I think one of the questions is, if you've made money, what non-profits do you give the money to? Assume you want to give some money... towards something of a philanthropic purpose. And it is extraordinary how many pushy people there are advancing various nonprofit causes. And the dog pound people or people like that, very sharp elbows, they're extremely rude. "It's such a good cause." And the compound effect of that is really quite extraordinary. And so I think that's probably an example where I think the misallocation of resources is extraordinary. I mean, I think in the for-profit case, there's sort of a lot of things that are misprioritized.

Non-profit, things are measured less well. It's misprioritized, in my mind, far worse. I find a lot of it to be just weirdly boring. So most charity dinners, you have just one boring speech after another and people sort of think they can get away with it because they're doing something good and make you suffer through a whole evening of utter boredom. But anyway, that's a context where I think it happens to an unbelievable degree.

Do we have any ideas about fixing this? I mean, I've been trying to brute force it by actually explaining cognitive biases to people and actually trying to fix what I perceive to be the underlying problems in the thought processes. But I'm wondering if anyone has any other approaches to fixing that.

Yeah. Embarrassing people helps. But I think Peter's put his finger on it in that for the most important causes that people are most in denial about, even embarrassing people is really hard. People are just willing to make complete fools of themselves in respect of their logical ability in analyzing these really important problems and the importance of them, and are willing to... gravitate to the most absurd knee-jerk reactions. I mean, of course, we're all familiar with the sorts of things that are said in favor of aging. And I'm sure Eliezer has the same sorts of experience. It's very strange.

Yeah, I probably bias a little bit too heavily towards trying to explain this to people as well, and I'm never sure that's quite the right mode because there's so many different social and psychological reasons that people are blocked from thinking about it. But that is my bias, is to try to just pound on, 'This is what's really important, this is why it matters.' Trying to connect it to other issues, I think, is fairly important so that if this problem doesn't get fixed, other problems will arise. There's a way in which your common-sense views on the world are predicated on all these other things. So you try to just come up with different cuts at it.

Repeating yourself a lot helps as well. Just giving a ridiculous number of talks and a ridiculous number of interviews and so on, which is obviously what I do.

It makes things more true.

So if you don't think you maybe should explain things so much, what other approaches might you take? Have you tried any other approaches?

I think my bias is towards explaining things. I think there's obviously a degree to which trying to just implement things directly and just unilaterally do things is of some value. So it's like, you know, do you... try to convince people to start technology companies? Do you start them yourself? Do you try to... And I think there is something to be said for... There's obviously a degree to which you don't want to just talk about things, you want to actually do them. So I think some combination of that.

Interested in... We could go to Q&A. Oh, yeah, okay, great. I'd especially like to ask if members of the audience have any other approaches than explaining that you might want to suggest. I'd be happy to hear, especially if we've got some concerns that it might...

So we're taking comments as well as questions?

I'd be happy to take comments as well as questions. I'm actually curious. This idea of explaining being a bad idea is kind of... Sean's looking worried already. All right. You first.

Yeah, I have a quick question. You all seem to want to change the world in some way, like you have some vision of what the world should be like versus what it's like now. What would you say that is for each of you, and do you think that it's quantifiably better than the way the world is now, and why?

Anyone? Audrey?

I didn't quite hear the question, actually.

Yeah, I didn't hear the last part of the question either.

I think he was saying, what would the world be like for it to be better?

What would the world be like? Oh, I could go on about this for weeks.

Okay, well, instead of Eliezer going on for weeks, why don't I just answer instead? I'll take three seconds. I think it's a subjective decision, and that's okay.

If people stopped dying all the time and actually had time to learn from their mistakes without dying of them, well, actually, that in itself would tend to fix a whole lot of problems over time. So I think I'll just go with that one instead of the other 300 edits.

Okay, so it's kind of an ROI question. My background is in film and entertainment in the record business and I'm thinking in terms of everybody here who's watching the football games that you mentioned. I see billions of dollars going into entertainment and sports and all these other things. How can we make what we're doing, the singularity movement, relevant to the common man so that we can get those billions of dollars going into this?

Got it. Aubrey, you want billions of dollars. Eliezer, who only wants millions, so you go.

I'll take millions for the moment. What can we do? Well, getting people to identify with it is of course very important. The reason we started the Methuselah Mouse Prize back in 2003 was because a lot of people identify with prizes and world records and so on much more easily than they do with dry scientific arguments. And in general, finding new tricks like that, tricks to get people interested, to build communities. We ought to do a great deal more, I think, in this space in social networks, to build up more interest at Facebook and Twitter and all those places like that. And certainly in the SENS Foundation, we're going to be doing that over the next short while. Generally, just getting people to be less

Scared, less embarrassed about even thinking about these things, let alone thinking about them rationally. All right. You know, I think, I think if we get, if we could, if we could get a few celebrities who have, who clearly have a high IQ, to, to, to—and the few celebrities who have a high IQ, or whatever, however we want to sequence that sentence—to, to get involved in this, that might be very helpful. Great. No, it's over.

I'm sorry, that was also, you know.

I hate to take advantage of the situation, but I know some celebrities. Take advantage of the situation as well. It's true.

There's public information. We can talk later. Okay. Thank you.