[Music]
so good evening everyone
so in 1967 Richard Brautigan published a
poem and it was titled all watched over
by machines of loving grace and he
suggested a future in which our
technologies our machines had such
understanding that they would care for
us and relieve us from the struggles of
our everyday life so today I we’re again
fascinated by a future with machines you
know things like artificially
intelligent computers and self-driving
cars and robots it seems to me though
that that hope for machines that would
take care of us has been in large part
taken over by fear that machines might
replace us or even destroy us so in this
talk I want to address these hopes and
fears for our technologies but to do
that I’ve got to tackle some really
tough questions questions like is the
world a machine and how do things come
to exist and can we build technologies
that understand the world all by
themselves now I’ve spent the last ten
years rearranging my brain trying to
answer these questions and I’m going to
spend the next 10 minutes trying to
rearrange yours so hang on
so the first I’m going to talk about
what it is to be a machine so I think
there are two things that make machines
different from us and from what we
typically think of as the natural world
the first thing is that machines are
essentially the sum of their parts and
by that I mean we can take machines
apart into pieces but we can also put
the pieces back together and recover the
entire machine this also means that we
can replace broken parts and that we can
make copies of machines by putting
together similar kinds of parts now this
is very much unlike us we are indeed
made of many parts but we can’t simply
remove and replace them and we can’t
make copies of ourselves either a car
losing a headlight and a person losing
an eye aren’t the same thing
now the second difference is that
machines are connected to the world
through us my car drives because I Drive
it my phone makes a call because I call
somebody
everything that machines know about the
world they know because we have built it
or designed it into them again this is
very much unlike us we know about the
world because we’re deeply embedded in
it and we change as it changes and we
could say the same thing about all
living things my dog knows all about his
world without any help from me so I
think in everyday life most of us
realized that we’re not machines right
real life is just too complicated and
too unpredictable to be a machine as
almost any family gathering would
instantly confirm and we actually get
into trouble when we try to describe the
world sorry about that as a kind of
machine speaking of machines so we get
into trouble and so here’s a story to
sort of illustrate what I mean so
suppose that you and I want to go out
and we want to build a forest on a
barren plot of land and so we might look
at a real forest and see there are trees
and so then we might make things that
look like trees out of plastic and put
them in the ground with concrete and I
might say hey you know that Forest has a
stream so then we might dig a ditch and
pump water through the ditch
and you might decide that what we really
need is to make leaves out of fabric and
attach them to the trees with actuators
that release them in the fall and of
course this is a terrible idea
it’s a ridiculous idea right everybody
knows that if you want to build a forest
you need seeds and water and air and
sunlight in time for a forest to grow so
that the point is that a forest is an
evolved entity that’s intimately
connected with its an environment and it
cannot be assembled from a collection of
parts so a forest isn’t a machine
so given this simple story though you
might be surprised to hear how much we
want to describe the world as a machine
and as an example the pinnacle of
scientific achievement is the
description of some part of the universe
as a simple mechanistic formula
something like Newton’s famous law that
says force equals mass times
acceleration you see the great thing
about machines is that because they’re
disconnected from the world and because
they’re essentially a collection of
parts they’re simple
and they’re easy to predict what they’re
gonna do but if we you know take this
love of simple things to its logical
extreme we come to the idea of a
universe that’s completely mechanistic
and when we do that we also arrive at
the conclusion that we need a
supernatural entity to create it just
like a machine needs an engineer a
mechanistic universe needs a creator now
in my experience this idea that the
world some kind of machine is actually
really common even among scientists so
curiously I find that like some
religious fundamentalists some
scientists are actually creationists
although maybe they don’t see it that
way
but the idea that the universe is a
machine is not what science actually
tells us if the universe were a machine
then science would come up with simple
formulas that describe everything even
large complicated things but this isn’t
what science finds what we find are
enormous numbers of specialized
descriptions of the various parts of the
universe that aren’t simple we only find
simple descriptions when we look at
simple things and this is how we get
things like Newton’s laws so to say it
differently science shows that we can
take the universe apart into pieces and
describe the pieces but we can’t put the
pieces back together into a simple
understanding of what the universe is so
science shows that the universe isn’t a
machine but if the universe isn’t the
machine and what is it so the house that
I grew up in in Virginia had rain
gutters and downspouts two concrete
blocks on the ground that channelled
water away from the house and when I was
a kid I used to run around and turn over
these concrete blocks to see what was
underneath and I remembered this really
well because there were all these bugs
underneath there you know really
weird-looking stuff like centipedes and
pill bugs and more
and their larvae and carcasses and I was
always fascinated because the bugs were
doing things and I thought how do they
know what to do why are they there why
is there a world under this concrete
block and who could possibly care enough
about them to create them and though I
couldn’t really say so say why at the
time you know these bugs under the mud
in the mud really bugged me and and they
they bugged me because I you know I came
to understand that I feared that I might
not be that much different right how did
I come to exist how do I know what I how
do I know what I know why do I do what I
do and more recently as I dress the
problems of you know can we build
technologies that know about the world
all by themselves the same questions
come up right how should such a
technology come to exist how should
these technologies know what they know
or know what to do so in a mechanistic
universe the answers to these questions
are simple but they’re not very
satisfying you know the answer is that
the Creator made it this way and this
mechanistic universe is evidently
incorrect both in our personal
experience and sort of in the broad
efforts of science but I think we cling
to it nonetheless at least in part
because we can’t explain how things come
to exist so I would like to offer a non
mechanistic anti supernatural
evolutionary worldview of how things
come to exist I propose that the
universe is uncaused and complete in and
of itself and that it began with a
featureless singularity of pure
potential a Big Bang I propose that the
universe derives from the pouring out of
this potential into the creation the
evolution and the existence of
everything in the universe I propose
that this thermodynamic evolution is not
a question of mechanization it’s a
question of self-consistency I propose
that causation the idea that one thing
follows another in time is the result of
evolution and not the other way around I
propose that the universe fits together
because it derives from a common origin
and evolves under a common principle I
propose that every aspect of our lives
reflects this thermodynamic evolution
our birth our development our thinking
our interaction with others our
interaction with the environment our
technologies our evolution as a species
and our death so simply put I propose
that existence derives from
thermodynamic evolution now some of you
may have heard of the second law of
thermodynamics the idea that the entropy
of the universe which has to do with the
distribution and disorder of energy is
always increasing so the idea of
thermodynamic evolution is exactly this
except it adds the requirement that an
organization must emerge for that to
happen so in everyday language though
thermodynamic evolution is simply the
idea that organizations spontaneously
emerge in order to use energy in the
environment for example so wood is a
kind of concentrated chemical energy
that when we burn it with oxygen
releases heat broadly into the
environment but in order for that to
happen
an organization has to emerge a fire in
this case that connects the oxygen to
the wood at high temperature now the
oxygen and the wood don’t cause the fire
in a mechanistic sense only in the sense
that they create a thermodynamic
such that a fire can emerge if the
conditions are right as another example
I am made up of atoms but the atoms of
which I may don’t cause my existence
energy in the environment in a complex
process of thermodynamic evolution
enable the atoms that are me to come
together and the same can be said of
human organizations like businesses so
businesses are collections of people and
assets but these people and assets
aren’t a machine that causes the
business to exist
businesses evolve in a complex
environment and extract energy from
there from the environment to do that
now the reason that the people and the
assets fit in the business the reason
that the atoms in my body fit together
the reason that trees fit within the
forest is that they evolved together so
things that don’t evolve together don’t
fit together
that’s where expressions like fish out
of water come from so you would think we
would have figured this out by now but
we haven’t figured it out yet if I look
back you know on my childhood you know
the bugs and the mud I would say that
you know no computer no phone no robot
could survive under a concrete block or
anywhere in the real world on its own
the problem with our technologies today
is that they can’t evolve to fit into
their own environments they only evolve
if we do it for them that’s why you get
constant software updates on your phones
and your computers so the net of all
this is that if our machines are doing
good or bad things for us today it’s our
fault
all right we’re the one doing the
evolution for them I think however that
were on the cusp of being able to build
electronic systems that can evolve
so the interesting thing about
electronic systems today is that the
basic elements things like transistors
have important things in common with the
basic elements of biochemistry things
like proteins so transistors and
proteins are roughly the same size they
can both be configured to form complex
networks and the energies and the
temperatures that matter in the
formation of those networks are
comparable and for these reasons I think
that we can build electronic systems
that spontaneously evolved complex
networks in response to electrical
potentials in their environment now we
don’t know how to do this yet and we’re
really not even trying and I think the
reason we’re not trying is we’re stuck
with a largely unrecognized mechanistic
world view that prevents us from knowing
what it is we should try to do so what
we do instead is we build bigger
machines and we program them now someday
we’re going to get this figured out
though we are going to build systems I
call these things thermodynamic
computers by the way and someday we’re
going to figure this out we’re going to
figure out how to do this and we’re
going to build technologies that aren’t
machines that can evolve in the world on
their own and when we do that they’re
going to evil they’re going to grow up
in environments that we curate they’re
going to be more like our kids than our
computers which should be interesting
actually so it is actually maybe
possible that they could learn enough
about us of not learn enough about us to
actually care for us as individuals and
so perhaps this vision that Brautigan
had five decades ago of technologies of
loving grace is actually possible
you
so good evening everyone
so in 1967 Richard Brautigan published a
poem and it was titled all watched over
by machines of loving grace and he
suggested a future in which our
technologies our machines had such
understanding that they would care for
us and relieve us from the struggles of
our everyday life so today I we’re again
fascinated by a future with machines you
know things like artificially
intelligent computers and self-driving
cars and robots it seems to me though
that that hope for machines that would
take care of us has been in large part
taken over by fear that machines might
replace us or even destroy us so in this
talk I want to address these hopes and
fears for our technologies but to do
that I’ve got to tackle some really
tough questions questions like is the
world a machine and how do things come
to exist and can we build technologies
that understand the world all by
themselves now I’ve spent the last ten
years rearranging my brain trying to
answer these questions and I’m going to
spend the next 10 minutes trying to
rearrange yours so hang on
so the first I’m going to talk about
what it is to be a machine so I think
there are two things that make machines
different from us and from what we
typically think of as the natural world
the first thing is that machines are
essentially the sum of their parts and
by that I mean we can take machines
apart into pieces but we can also put
the pieces back together and recover the
entire machine this also means that we
can replace broken parts and that we can
make copies of machines by putting
together similar kinds of parts now this
is very much unlike us we are indeed
made of many parts but we can’t simply
remove and replace them and we can’t
make copies of ourselves either a car
losing a headlight and a person losing
an eye aren’t the same thing
now the second difference is that
machines are connected to the world
through us my car drives because I Drive
it my phone makes a call because I call
somebody
everything that machines know about the
world they know because we have built it
or designed it into them again this is
very much unlike us we know about the
world because we’re deeply embedded in
it and we change as it changes and we
could say the same thing about all
living things my dog knows all about his
world without any help from me so I
think in everyday life most of us
realized that we’re not machines right
real life is just too complicated and
too unpredictable to be a machine as
almost any family gathering would
instantly confirm and we actually get
into trouble when we try to describe the
world sorry about that as a kind of
machine speaking of machines so we get
into trouble and so here’s a story to
sort of illustrate what I mean so
suppose that you and I want to go out
and we want to build a forest on a
barren plot of land and so we might look
at a real forest and see there are trees
and so then we might make things that
look like trees out of plastic and put
them in the ground with concrete and I
might say hey you know that Forest has a
stream so then we might dig a ditch and
pump water through the ditch
and you might decide that what we really
need is to make leaves out of fabric and
attach them to the trees with actuators
that release them in the fall and of
course this is a terrible idea
it’s a ridiculous idea right everybody
knows that if you want to build a forest
you need seeds and water and air and
sunlight in time for a forest to grow so
that the point is that a forest is an
evolved entity that’s intimately
connected with its an environment and it
cannot be assembled from a collection of
parts so a forest isn’t a machine
so given this simple story though you
might be surprised to hear how much we
want to describe the world as a machine
and as an example the pinnacle of
scientific achievement is the
description of some part of the universe
as a simple mechanistic formula
something like Newton’s famous law that
says force equals mass times
acceleration you see the great thing
about machines is that because they’re
disconnected from the world and because
they’re essentially a collection of
parts they’re simple
and they’re easy to predict what they’re
gonna do but if we you know take this
love of simple things to its logical
extreme we come to the idea of a
universe that’s completely mechanistic
and when we do that we also arrive at
the conclusion that we need a
supernatural entity to create it just
like a machine needs an engineer a
mechanistic universe needs a creator now
in my experience this idea that the
world some kind of machine is actually
really common even among scientists so
curiously I find that like some
religious fundamentalists some
scientists are actually creationists
although maybe they don’t see it that
way
but the idea that the universe is a
machine is not what science actually
tells us if the universe were a machine
then science would come up with simple
formulas that describe everything even
large complicated things but this isn’t
what science finds what we find are
enormous numbers of specialized
descriptions of the various parts of the
universe that aren’t simple we only find
simple descriptions when we look at
simple things and this is how we get
things like Newton’s laws so to say it
differently science shows that we can
take the universe apart into pieces and
describe the pieces but we can’t put the
pieces back together into a simple
understanding of what the universe is so
science shows that the universe isn’t a
machine but if the universe isn’t the
machine and what is it so the house that
I grew up in in Virginia had rain
gutters and downspouts two concrete
blocks on the ground that channelled
water away from the house and when I was
a kid I used to run around and turn over
these concrete blocks to see what was
underneath and I remembered this really
well because there were all these bugs
underneath there you know really
weird-looking stuff like centipedes and
pill bugs and more
and their larvae and carcasses and I was
always fascinated because the bugs were
doing things and I thought how do they
know what to do why are they there why
is there a world under this concrete
block and who could possibly care enough
about them to create them and though I
couldn’t really say so say why at the
time you know these bugs under the mud
in the mud really bugged me and and they
they bugged me because I you know I came
to understand that I feared that I might
not be that much different right how did
I come to exist how do I know what I how
do I know what I know why do I do what I
do and more recently as I dress the
problems of you know can we build
technologies that know about the world
all by themselves the same questions
come up right how should such a
technology come to exist how should
these technologies know what they know
or know what to do so in a mechanistic
universe the answers to these questions
are simple but they’re not very
satisfying you know the answer is that
the Creator made it this way and this
mechanistic universe is evidently
incorrect both in our personal
experience and sort of in the broad
efforts of science but I think we cling
to it nonetheless at least in part
because we can’t explain how things come
to exist so I would like to offer a non
mechanistic anti supernatural
evolutionary worldview of how things
come to exist I propose that the
universe is uncaused and complete in and
of itself and that it began with a
featureless singularity of pure
potential a Big Bang I propose that the
universe derives from the pouring out of
this potential into the creation the
evolution and the existence of
everything in the universe I propose
that this thermodynamic evolution is not
a question of mechanization it’s a
question of self-consistency I propose
that causation the idea that one thing
follows another in time is the result of
evolution and not the other way around I
propose that the universe fits together
because it derives from a common origin
and evolves under a common principle I
propose that every aspect of our lives
reflects this thermodynamic evolution
our birth our development our thinking
our interaction with others our
interaction with the environment our
technologies our evolution as a species
and our death so simply put I propose
that existence derives from
thermodynamic evolution now some of you
may have heard of the second law of
thermodynamics the idea that the entropy
of the universe which has to do with the
distribution and disorder of energy is
always increasing so the idea of
thermodynamic evolution is exactly this
except it adds the requirement that an
organization must emerge for that to
happen so in everyday language though
thermodynamic evolution is simply the
idea that organizations spontaneously
emerge in order to use energy in the
environment for example so wood is a
kind of concentrated chemical energy
that when we burn it with oxygen
releases heat broadly into the
environment but in order for that to
happen
an organization has to emerge a fire in
this case that connects the oxygen to
the wood at high temperature now the
oxygen and the wood don’t cause the fire
in a mechanistic sense only in the sense
that they create a thermodynamic
such that a fire can emerge if the
conditions are right as another example
I am made up of atoms but the atoms of
which I may don’t cause my existence
energy in the environment in a complex
process of thermodynamic evolution
enable the atoms that are me to come
together and the same can be said of
human organizations like businesses so
businesses are collections of people and
assets but these people and assets
aren’t a machine that causes the
business to exist
businesses evolve in a complex
environment and extract energy from
there from the environment to do that
now the reason that the people and the
assets fit in the business the reason
that the atoms in my body fit together
the reason that trees fit within the
forest is that they evolved together so
things that don’t evolve together don’t
fit together
that’s where expressions like fish out
of water come from so you would think we
would have figured this out by now but
we haven’t figured it out yet if I look
back you know on my childhood you know
the bugs and the mud I would say that
you know no computer no phone no robot
could survive under a concrete block or
anywhere in the real world on its own
the problem with our technologies today
is that they can’t evolve to fit into
their own environments they only evolve
if we do it for them that’s why you get
constant software updates on your phones
and your computers so the net of all
this is that if our machines are doing
good or bad things for us today it’s our
fault
all right we’re the one doing the
evolution for them I think however that
were on the cusp of being able to build
electronic systems that can evolve
so the interesting thing about
electronic systems today is that the
basic elements things like transistors
have important things in common with the
basic elements of biochemistry things
like proteins so transistors and
proteins are roughly the same size they
can both be configured to form complex
networks and the energies and the
temperatures that matter in the
formation of those networks are
comparable and for these reasons I think
that we can build electronic systems
that spontaneously evolved complex
networks in response to electrical
potentials in their environment now we
don’t know how to do this yet and we’re
really not even trying and I think the
reason we’re not trying is we’re stuck
with a largely unrecognized mechanistic
world view that prevents us from knowing
what it is we should try to do so what
we do instead is we build bigger
machines and we program them now someday
we’re going to get this figured out
though we are going to build systems I
call these things thermodynamic
computers by the way and someday we’re
going to figure this out we’re going to
figure out how to do this and we’re
going to build technologies that aren’t
machines that can evolve in the world on
their own and when we do that they’re
going to evil they’re going to grow up
in environments that we curate they’re
going to be more like our kids than our
computers which should be interesting
actually so it is actually maybe
possible that they could learn enough
about us of not learn enough about us to
actually care for us as individuals and
so perhaps this vision that Brautigan
had five decades ago of technologies of
loving grace is actually possible
you
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