The following is a conversation with Alex Garland, writer and director of many imaginative and
philosophical films from the dreamlike exploration of human self-destruction in the movie Annihilation
to the deep questions of consciousness and intelligence raised in the movie Ex Machina,
which to me is one of the greatest movies in artificial intelligence ever made.
I'm releasing this podcast to coincide with the release of his new series called Devs,
that will premiere this Thursday, March 5th on Hulu as part of FX on Hulu.
It explores many of the themes this very podcast is about,
from quantum mechanics, to artificial life, to simulation, to the modern nature of power in
the tech world. I got a chance to watch a preview and loved it. The acting is great, Nick Offerman
especially is incredible in it, the cinematography is beautiful, and the philosophical and scientific
ideas explored are profound. And for me as an engineer and scientist, we're just fun to see
brought to life. For example, if you watch the trailer for the series carefully, you'll see
there's a programmer with a Russian accent looking at a screen with Python-like code on it that appears
to be using a library that interfaces with a quantum computer. This attention and technical
detail on several levels is impressive, and one of the reasons I'm a big fan of how Alex weaves
science and philosophy together in his work. Meeting Alex for me was unlikely, but it was
life-changing in ways I may only be able to articulate in a few years. Just as Meeting
spot many of Boston Dynamics for the first time planted a seed of an idea in my mind,
so did Meeting Alex Garland. He's humble, curious, intelligent, and to me an inspiration. Plus,
he's just really a fun person to talk with about the biggest possible questions in our universe.
This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five
stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter, and Lex
Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. As usual, I'll do one or two minutes of ads now and never any ads in
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the first decentralized cryptocurrency was released just over 10 years ago. So given that history,
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one of my favorite organizations that is helping advance robotics and STEM education for young
people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Alex Garland. You described
the world inside the shimmer in the movie Annihilation as dreamlike, in that it's internally
consistent but detached from reality. That leads me to ask, do you think a philosophical question,
I apologize, do you think we might be living in a dream or in a simulation, like the kind that
the shimmer creates? We human beings here today. Yeah. I want to sort of separate that out into
two things. Yes, I think we're living in a dream of sorts. No, I don't think we're living in a
simulation. I think we're living on a planet with a very thin layer of atmosphere, and the
planet is in a very large space, and the space is full of other planets and stars and quasars
and stuff like that. And I don't think, I don't think those physical objects, I don't think the
matter in that universe is simulated, I think it's there. We are definitely, there's a whole
problem with saying definitely, but in my opinion, I'll just go back to that. I think it seems very
like we're living in a dream state, I'm pretty sure we are. And I think that's just to do with
the nature of how we experience the world, we experience it in a subjective way. And the thing
I've learned most as I've got older in some respects is the degree to which reality is
counterintuitive, and that the things that are presented to us as objective turn out not to be
objective, and quantum mechanics is full of that kind of thing, but actually just day-to-day life
is full of that kind of thing as well. So my understanding of the way the brain works is
you get some information to hit your optic nerve, and then your brain makes its best guess about
what it's seeing, or what it's saying it's seeing. It may or may not be an accurate best guess, it
might be an inaccurate best guess, and that gap, the best guess gap, means that we are essentially
living in a subjective state, which means that we're in a dream state. So I think you could enlarge
on the dream state in all sorts of ways, but so yes, dream state, no simulation would be where
I'd come down. So going further deeper into that direction, you've also described that world
as a psychedelia. So on that topic, I'm curious about that world, on the topic of psychedelic
drugs, do you see those kinds of chemicals that modify our perception as a distortion of our
perception of reality or a window into another reality? No, I think what I'd be saying is that
we live in a distorted reality, and then those kinds of drugs give us a different kind of
distorted perspective. Yeah, exactly. They just give an alternate distortion. And I think that
what they really do is they give a distorted perception, which is a little bit more
allied to daydreams or unconscious interests. So if for some reason, you're feeling unconsciously
anxious at that moment, and you take a psychedelic drug, you'll have a more pronounced unpleasant
experience. And if you're feeling very calm or happy, you might have a good time. But yeah,
so if I'm saying we're starting from a premise, our starting point is we're already in the
slightly psychedelic state. What those drugs do is help you go further down an avenue or maybe
a slightly different avenue, but that's what. So in that movie Annihilation, the shimmer,
this alternate dreamlike state is created by, I believe, perhaps an alien entity. Of course,
everything's up to interpretation. But do you think there's, in our world, in our
universe? Do you think there's intelligent life out there? And if so, how different is it from us
humans? Well, one of the things I was trying to do in Annihilation was to offer up a form of alien
life that was actually alien. Because it would often seem to me that in the way we would represent
aliens in books or cinema or television, or any one of the sort of storytelling mediums,
is we would always give them very human-like qualities. So they wanted to teach us about
galactic federations, or they wanted to eat us, or they wanted our resources, like our water,
or they want to enslave us, or whatever it happens to be. But all of these are incredibly
human-like motivations. And I was interested in the idea of an alien that was not in any way
like us. It didn't share. It maybe it had a completely different clock speed. Maybe it's
way... So we're talking about, we're looking at each other, we're getting information,
light hits our optic nerve, our brain makes the best guess of what we're doing. Sometimes it's
right something, the thing we were talking about before. What if this alien doesn't have an optic
nerve? Maybe it's way of encountering the space it's in is wholly different. Maybe it has a different
relationship with gravity. The basic laws of physics that operates under might be fundamentally
different. It could be a different time scale and so on. Yeah. Or it could be the same laws,
it could be the same underlying laws of physics. It's a machine created, or it's a creature created
in a quantum mechanical way. It just ends up in a very, very different place to the one we end up in.
So part of the preoccupation with annihilation was to come up with an alien that was really alien
and didn't give us... And it didn't give us and we didn't give it any kind of easy connection between
human and the alien. Because I think it was to do with the idea that you could have an alien that
landed on this planet that wouldn't even know we were here. And we might only glancingly know it
was here. There'd just be this strange point where the Venn diagrams connected where we could sense
each other or something like that. So in the movie, first of all, incredibly original view of what an
alien life would be. And in that sense, it's a huge success. Let's go inside your imagination.
Did the alien, that alien entity know anything about humans when it landed?
No.
So the idea is you're basically an alien life is trying to reach out to anything that might be
able to hear its mechanism of communication. Or was it simply, was it just basically their
biologist exploring different kinds of stuff? But you see, this is the interesting thing is,
as soon as you say they're biologists, you've done the thing of attributing human type motivations
to it. I was trying to free myself from anything like that. So all sorts of questions you might
answer about this notional alien, I wouldn't be able to answer because I don't know what it was
or how it worked. I had some rough ideas. Like it had a very, very, very slow clock speed.
And I thought maybe the way it is interacting with this environment is a little bit like the way an
octopus will change its color forms around the space that it's in. So it's sort of reacting
to what it's in to an extent. But the reason it's reacting in that way is indeterminate.
But it's clock speed was slower than our human life clock speed, but it's faster than evolution.
Faster than our evolution. Yeah, given the four billion years it took us to get here.
Then yes, maybe it started eight. If you look at the human civilization as a single organism,
in that sense, this evolution could be us. The evolution of living organisms on earth could
be just a single organism. That's its life is the evolution process that eventually will
lead to probably the heat death of the universe or something before that.
That's just an incredible idea. So you almost don't know, you've created something that you
don't even know how it works. Because anytime I tried to look into how it might work, I would
then inevitably be attaching my kind of thought processes into it. And I wanted to try and put
a bubble around it where I say, no, this is alien in its most alien form. I have no real
point of contact. So unfortunately, I can't talk to Stanley Kubrick. So I'm really fortunate
to get a chance to talk to you. On this particular notion, I'd like to ask it a bunch of different
ways and we'll explore it in different ways. But do you ever consider human imagination,
your imagination as a window into a possible future and that what you're doing, you're putting
that imagination on paper as a writer and then on screen as a director. And that plants the seeds
in the minds of millions of future and current scientists. And so your imagination, you putting
it down actually makes it as a reality. So it's almost like a first step of the scientific method.
Like you imagining what's possible in your new series with ex machina
is actually inspiring, you know, thousands of 12 year olds, millions of scientists and
actually creating the future view of imagine. Well, all I could say is that from my point of
view, it's almost exactly the reverse. Because I see that pretty much everything I do is a reaction
to what scientists are doing. I'm an interested lay person. And I feel, you know, this individual,
I feel that the most interesting area that humans are involved in is science. I think art is very,
very interesting. But the most interesting is science. And science is in a weird place because
maybe around the time Newton was alive, if a very, very interested lay person said to themselves,
I want to really understand what Newton is saying about the way the world works.
With a few years of dedicated thinking, they would be able to understand
the sort of principles he was laying out. And I don't think that's true anymore. I think that's
stopped being true now. So I'm a pretty smart guy. And if I said to myself, I want to really,
really understand what is currently the state of quantum mechanics or string theory or any of the
sort of branching areas of it, I wouldn't be able to. I'd be intellectually incapable of doing it
because because to work in those fields at the moment is a bit like being an athlete. I suspect
you need to start when you're 12. And if you start in your mid 20s, start trying to understand it
in your mid 20s, then you're just never going to catch up. That's the way it feels to me.
So what I do is I try to make myself open. So the people that you're implying maybe I would
influence, to me, it's exactly the other way around. These people are strongly influencing me.
I'm thinking they're doing something fascinating. I'm concentrating and working as hard as I can
to try and understand the implications of what they say. And in some ways, often what I'm trying
to do is disseminate their ideas into a means by which it can enter a public conversation.
So X Machina contains lots of name checks, all sorts of existing thought experiments,
you know, shadows on Plato's Cave and Mary in the Black and White Room and all sorts of different
long standing thought processes about sentience or consciousness or subjectivity or gender or
whatever it happens to be. And then I'm trying to marshal that into a narrative to say, look,
this stuff is interesting and it's also relevant. And this is my best shot at it. So I'm the one
being influenced in my construction. That's fascinating. Of course, you would say that
because you're not even aware of your own. That's probably what Kubrick would say too,
right, is in describing why how 9000 is created, the way how 9000 is created,
is you're just studying what's, but the reality when the specifics of the knowledge passes through
your imagination, I would argue that you're incorrect in thinking that you're just disseminating
knowledge that the very act of your imagination, consuming that science, it creates something,
creates the next step, potentially creates the next step. I certainly think that's true with
2001 Space Odyssey, I think at its best. If it fails, it's true of that. Yeah, it's true of that,
definitely. At its best, it plans something it's hard to describe, but it inspires the next generation.
And it could be field dependent. So your new series has more a connection to physics, quantum
physics, quantum mechanics, quantum computing, and yet ex machina is more artificial intelligence.
I know more about AI. My sense that AI is much, much earlier in its, in the depth of its understanding.
I would argue nobody understands anything to the depth that physicists do about physics. In AI,
nobody understands AI, that there is a lot of importance and role for imagination, which they
think we're a Freud, imagine the subconscious, we're in that stage of AI, where there's a lot
of imagination you didn't think in outside the box. Yeah, it's interesting the spread of discussions
and the spread of anxieties that exist about AI fascinate me, the way in which some people seem
terrified about it, whilst also pursuing it. And I've never shared that fear about AI personally.
But the way in which it agitates people, and also the people who it agitates, I find kind of
fascinating. Are you afraid? Are you excited? Are you sad by the possibility, let's take the
existential risk of artificial intelligence, by the possibility that an artificial intelligence
system becomes our offspring and makes us obsolete? I mean, it's a huge, it's a huge subject to talk
about, I suppose. But one of the things I think is that humans are actually very experienced
at creating new life forms, because that's why you and I are both here, and it's why everyone on
the planet is here. And so something in the process of having a living thing that exists,
that didn't exist previously, is very much encoded into the structures of our life and
the structures of our societies. It doesn't mean we always get it right, but it does mean we've
learned quite a lot about that. We've learned quite a lot about what the dangers are of allowing
things to be unchecked. And it's why we then create systems of checks and balances in our
government and so on and so forth. I mean, that's not to say, the other thing is it seems like
there's all sorts of things that you could put into a machine that you would not be.
So with us, we sort of roughly try to give some rules to live by, and some of us then
live by those rules and some don't. And with a machine, it feels like you could enforce those
things. So partly because of our previous experience and partly because of the different
nature of a machine, I just don't feel anxious about it. More, I just see all the good,
broadly speaking, the good that can come from it. But that's just where I am on that anxiety
spectrum. There's a sadness. So we as humans give birth to other humans, right? But there's
generations. And there's often in the older generation a sadness about what the world has
become now. I mean, that's kind of... Yeah, there is, but there's a counterpoint as well,
which is that most parents would wish for a better life for their children. So there may be a
regret about some things about the past, but broadly speaking, what people really want is
that things will be better for the future generations, not worse. And then it's a question
about what constitutes a future generation. A future generation could involve people,
it also could involve machines, and it could involve a sort of cross-pollinated version of
the two, but none of those things make me feel anxious. It doesn't give you anxiety.
It doesn't excite you, like anything that's new. Not anything that's new. I don't think, for example,
I've got... My anxieties relate to things like social media. So I've got plenty of anxieties
about that. Which is also driven by artificial intelligence, in the sense that there's too
much information to be able to... An algorithm has to filter that information and present to you.
So ultimately, the algorithm, a simple, oftentimes simple algorithm, is controlling
the flow of information on social media. So that's another...
But at least my sense of it, I might be wrong, but my sense of it is that the algorithms have
an either conscious or unconscious bias, which is created by the people who are making the
algorithms and sort of delineating the areas to which those algorithms are going to lean.
And so, for example, the kind of thing I'd be worried about is that it hasn't been thought
about enough how dangerous it is to allow algorithms to create echo chambers, say.
But that doesn't seem to me to be about the AI or the algorithm. It's the naivety of the people
who are constructing the algorithms to do that thing, if you see what I mean.
Yes. So in your new series, Devs, and we could speak more broadly, there's...
Let's talk about the people constructing those algorithms, which in our modern society, Silicon
Valley, those algorithms happen to be a source of a lot of income because of advertisements.
So let me ask sort of a question about those people.
Are there current concerns and failures on social media? They're naivety.
I can't pronounce that word well. Are they naive? Are they...
I use that word carefully, but evil in intent or misaligned in intent?
I think that's a... Do they mean well and just go have an unintended consequence?
Or is there something dark in them that results in them creating a company, results in that
super competitive drive to be successful, and those are the people that will end up controlling
the algorithms? At a guess, I'd say there are instances of all those things.
So sometimes I think it's naivety. Sometimes I think it's extremely dark.
And sometimes I think people are not being naive or dark, and then in those instances are sometimes
generating things that are very benign, and other times generating things that despite
their best intentions are not very benign. It's something... I think the reason why I don't get
anxious about AI in terms of... Or at least AIs that have, I don't know, a relationship with...
Some sort of relationship with humans is that I think that's the stuff we're quite
well equipped to understand how to mitigate. The problem is issues that relate actually
to the power of humans or the wealth of humans, and that's where it's dangerous here and now.
So what I see... I tell you what I sometimes feel about Silicon Valley is that it's like Wall Street
in the 80s. It's rabidly capitalistic, absolutely rabidly capitalistic, and it's rabidly greedy.
But whereas in the 80s, the sense one had of Wall Street was that these people kind of knew they
were sharks, and in a way relished in being sharks, and dressed in sharp suits, and kind of lauded
over other people and felt good about doing it. Silicon Valley has managed to hide its voracious
Wall Street-like capitalism behind hipster t-shirts and cool cafes in the place where
they set up there. And so that obfuscates what's really going on, and what's really going on is
the absolute voracious pursuit of money and power. So that's where it gets shaky for me.
So that veneer, and you explore that brilliantly, that veneer of virtue that Silicon Valley has...
Which they believe themselves, I'm sure, for a lot of time.
Boy, okay. I hope to be one of those people.
And I believe that... So as maybe a devil's advocate term poorly used in this case,
what if some of them really are trying to build a better world? I can't...
I'm sure I think some of them are. I think I've spoken to ones who I believe in their heart feel
they're building a better world. Are they not able to in a sense?
No, they may or may not be. But it's just a zone with a lot of bullshit flying about.
And there's also another thing, which is this actually goes back to...
I always thought about some sports that later turned out to be corrupt in the way that the
sport, like who won the boxing match or how a football match got thrown or cricket match or
whatever happened to be. And I used to think, well, look, if there's a lot of money and there
really is a lot of money, people stand to make millions or even billions, you will find corruption
that's going to happen. So it's in the nature of its voracious appetite that some people will
be corrupt and some people will exploit and some people will exploit whilst thinking they're doing
something good. But there are also people who I think are very, very smart and very benign and
actually very self-aware. And so I'm not trying to wipe out the motivations of this entire area.
But I do... There are people in that world who scare the hell out of me. Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I'm a little bit naive in that. I don't care at all about money. And so
I'm... You might be one of the good guys. Yeah, but so the thought is, but I don't have money.
So my thought is if you give me a billion dollars, it would change nothing and I would spend it right
away on investing right back and creating a good world. But your intuition is that billion,
there's something about that money that maybe slowly corrupts. The people around you, there's
somebody gets in that corrupts your soul the way you view the world. Money does corrupt.
We know that. But there's a different sort of problem aside from just the money corrupts
thing that we're familiar with throughout history. And it's more about the sense of
reinforcement an individual gets, which is so... It effectively works like the reason I earned
all this money and so much more money than anyone else is because I'm very gifted. I'm actually a
bit smarter than they are or I'm a lot smarter than they are. And I can see the future in the
way they can't. And maybe some of those people are not particularly smart. They're very lucky
or they're very talented entrepreneurs. And there's a difference between... So in other words,
the acquisition of the money and power can suddenly start to feel like evidence of virtue.
And it's not evidence of virtue. It might be evidence of completely different things.
That's brilliantly put. Yeah. Yeah, that's brilliantly put. So I think one of the fundamental
drivers of my current morality, let me just represent nerds in general of all kinds, is
constant self-doubt and the signals. I'm very sensitive to signals from people that tell me
I'm doing the wrong thing. But when there's a huge inflow of money, you're just put it brilliantly
that that could become an overpowering signal that everything you do is right. And so your moral
compass can just get thrown off. Yeah. And that is not contained to Silicon Valley. That's across
the board in general. Yeah. Like I said, I'm from the Soviet Union. The current president
is convinced, I believe. Actually, he wants to do really good by the country and by the world.
But his moral clock may be, or our compass may be off because... Yeah. I mean, it's the interesting
thing about evil, which is that I think most people who do spectacularly evil things think
themselves they're doing really good things. They're not there thinking I am a sort of incarnation
of Satan. They're thinking, yeah, I've seen a way to fix the world and everyone else is wrong. Here
I go. Yeah. In fact, I'm having a fascinating conversation with a historian of Stalin. And
he took power. He actually got more power than almost any person in history. And he wanted,
he didn't want power. He just wanted, he truly, and this is what people don't realize, he truly
believe that communism will make for a better world. Absolutely. And he wanted power. He wanted
to destroy the competition to make sure that we actually make communism work in the Soviet Union
and that spread across the world. He was trying to do good. I think it's typically the case that
that's what people think they're doing. And I think that, but you don't need to go to Stalin.
I mean, Stalin, I think Stalin probably got pretty crazy, but actually that's another part of it,
which is that the other thing that comes from being convinced of your own virtue is that then
you stop listening to the modifiers around you. And that tends to drive people crazy. It's other
people that keep us sane. And if you stop listening to them, I think you go a bit mad. That also
that's funny. Disagreement keeps us sane. To jump back for an entire generation of AI researchers,
2001, a space odyssey put an image, the idea of human level, superhuman level intelligence into
their mind. Do you ever sort of jumping back to ex machina and talk a little bit about that? Do you
ever consider the audience of people who you, who build the systems, the roboticists, the scientists
that build the systems based on the stories you create, which I would argue, I mean, there's
literally most of the top researchers about 40, 50 years old and plus, you know, that's their favorite
movie, 2001 space odyssey. And it really is in their work, their idea of what ethics is,
of what is the target, the hope, the dangers of AI is that movie. Do you ever consider
the impact on those researchers when you create the work you do?
Certainly not with ex machina in relation to 2001, because I'm not sure, I mean, I'd be pleased if
there was, but I'm not sure in a way there isn't a fundamental discussion of issues to do with AI
that isn't already and better dealt with by 2001. 2001 does a very, very good account of
the way in which an AI might think and also potential issues with the way the AI might think.
And also, then a separate question about whether the AI is malevolent or benevolent. And 2001
doesn't really, it's a slightly odd thing to be making a film when you know there's a pre-existing
film, which is not a really super job. But there's a questions of consciousness embodiment and also
the same kinds of questions. Could you, because those are my two favorite movies. So can you
compare how 9000 and Ava, how 9000 from 2001 space odyssey and Ava from ex machina, the in your
view from a philosophical perspective, they've got different goals. The two AIs have completely
different goals. I think that's really the difference. So in some respects, ex machina
took as a premise. How do you assess whether something else has consciousness? So it was a
version of the Turing test, except instead of having the machine hidden, you put the machine in
plain sight in the way that we are in plain sight of each other and say now assess the consciousness
in a way it was illustrating the way in which you'd assess the state of consciousness of a machine
is this exactly the same way we assess the state of consciousness of each other. And in exactly
the same way that in a funny way, your sense of my consciousness is actually based primarily on
your own consciousness. That is also then true with the machine. And so it was actually about
how much of the sense of consciousness is a projection rather than something that consciousness
is actually containing. You really explored, you could argue that how sort of space Odyssey explores
idea of the Turing test for intelligence. On that test, there's no test, but it's more
focused on intelligence. And ex machina kind of goes around intelligence and says the consciousness
of the human to human, human to robot interaction is more important, at least the focus of that
particular particular movie. Yeah, it's about the interior state and and what constitutes the
interior state and how do we know it's there. And actually, in that respect, ex machina is as much
about consciousness in general, as it is to do specifically with machine consciousness. And
it's also interesting, you know, the thing you started asking about the dream state. And I was
saying, Well, I think we're all in a dream state, because we're all in a subjective state. One of
the things that I became aware of with ex machina is that the way in which people reacted to the
film was very based on what they took into the film. So many people thought ex machina was the
tale of a sort of evil robot who murders two men and escapes. And she has no empathy, for example,
because she's a machine. Whereas I felt, no, she was a conscious being with a consciousness
different from mine, but so what, imprisoned and made a bunch of value judgments about how
to get out of that box. And there's a moment which it sort of slightly bugs me, but nobody
ever has noticed it. And it's years after. So I might as well say it now, which is that after
Ava has escaped, she crosses a room. And as she's crossing a room, this is just before she leaves
the building, she looks over her shoulder and she smiles. And I thought, after all the conversation
about tests, in a way, the best indication you could have of the interior state of someone
is if they are not being observed, and they smile about something with their smiling for
themselves. And that to me was evidence of Ava's true sentence, whatever that sentence was.
That's really interesting. We don't get to observe Ava much
or something like a smile in any context, except through interaction, trying to convince others
that she's conscious. That's as beautiful. Exactly. Yeah. But it was a small, in a funny way,
I think maybe people saw it as an evil smile, like, ha, I fooled them. But actually, it was
just a smile. And I thought, well, in the end, after all the conversations about the test,
that was the answer to the test. And then off she goes. So if we align, if we just
delinkered a little bit longer on Hal and Ava, do you think in terms of motivation,
what was Hal's motivation? Is Hal good or evil? Is Ava good or evil?
Ava's good, in my opinion. And Hal is neutral. Because I don't think Hal is presented as having
a sophisticated emotional life. He has a set of paradigms, which is that the mission needs to
be completed. I mean, it's a version of the paper clip. The idea that it's just a super
intelligent machine, but it's just performed a particular task. And in doing that task,
may destroy everybody on earth or may achieve undesirable effects for us humans.
Precisely. But what if, okay.
At the very end, he said something like, I'm afraid, Dave, but that maybe he is on some level
experiencing fear, or it may be this is the terms in which it would be wise to stop someone from
doing the thing they're doing. If you see what it means.
Yes, absolutely. So actually, that's funny. So that's such a small, short exploration of
consciousness that I'm afraid. And then you just would X mock and say, okay, we're going to magnify
that part and then minimize the other part. That's a good way to sort of compare the two.
But if you could just use your imagination, and if Ava sort of, I don't know,
ran, ran, he was president of the United States, so had some power. So what kind of world would
you want to create if we, if you kind of say good. And there is a sense that she has a really,
like, there's a desire for a better human to human interaction, human to robot interaction in her.
But what kind of world do you think she would create with that desire?
See, that's a really, that's a very interesting question that I'm going to approach it slightly
obliquely, which is that if a friend of yours got stabbed in a mugging, and you then felt very
angry at the person who'd done the stabbing, but then you learned that it was a 15 year old
and the 15 year old, both their parents were addicted to crystal meth and the kid had been
addicted since he was 10. And he really never had any hope in the world. And he'd been driven crazy
by his upbringing and did the stabbing that would hugely modify. And it would also make
you wary about that kid then becoming president of America. And Ava has had a very, very distorted
introduction into the world. So although there's nothing as it, as it were organically within Ava
that would lean her towards badness, it's not that robots or sentient robots are bad. She did not,
her arrival into the world was being imprisoned by humans. So I'm not sure she'd be a great president.
The trajectory through which she arrived at her moral views have some dark elements.
But I like Ava personally. I like Ava. Would you vote for her?
I'm having difficulty finding anyone to vote for at the moment. In my country, or if I lived here
in yours. So that's a yes, I guess, because of the competition. She could easily do a better job
than any of the people we've got around at the moment. I'd vote for Boris Johnson.
So what is a good test of consciousness? Just we talk about consciousness a little bit more.
If something appears conscious, is it conscious? He mentioned the smile, which seems to be something
done. I mean, that's a really good indication because it's a tree falling in the forest with
nobody there to hear it. But does the appearance from a robotics perspective of consciousness
mean consciousness to you? No, I don't think you could say that fully, because I think you could
then easily have a thought experiment which said, we will create something which we know is not
conscious, but is going to give a very, very good account of seeming consciousness. And also,
it would be a particularly bad test where humans are involved because humans are so quick to project
sentience into things that don't have sentience. So someone could have their computer playing up
and feel as if their computer is being malevolent to them when it clearly isn't. And so,
so of all the things to judge consciousness, us humans are bad at, we're empathy machines.
So the flip side of that, the argument there is because we just attribute consciousness to
everything almost, anthropomorphize everything, including rumbas, that maybe consciousness
is not real, that we just attribute consciousness to each other. So you have a sense that there is
something really special going on in our mind that makes us unique and gives us subjective
experience. There's something very interesting going on in our minds. I'm slightly worried
about the word special, because it gets a bit, it nudges towards metaphysics and maybe even
magic. I mean, in some ways, something magic-like, which I don't think is there at all.
I mean, if you think about, so there's an idea called panpsychism that says consciousness is in
everything. Yeah, I don't buy that. I don't buy that. Yeah. So the idea that there is a thing
that it would be like to be the sun, because yeah, no, I don't buy that. I think that consciousness
is a thing. My sort of broad modification is that usually, the more I find out about things,
the more illusory our instinct is, and is leading us into a different direction about
what that thing actually is. That happens, it seems to me in modern science, that happens a
hell of a lot, whether it's to do with how even how big or small things are. So my sense is that
consciousness is a thing, but it isn't quite the thing or maybe very different from the thing that
we instinctively think it is. So it's there, it's very interesting, but we may be in sort of quite
fundamentally misunderstanding it for reasons that are based on intuition. So I have to ask,
this is this kind of an interesting question. The ex machina for many people, including myself,
is one of the greatest AI films ever made. Well, it's number two for me. Thanks. Yeah,
it's definitely number one. It was number one. I'd really have to anyway. Whenever you grow up
with something, right? Whenever you grow up with something, it's in the mud. But there's one of
the things that people bring up, you can't please everyone, including myself. This is what I first
reacted to the film, is the idea of the lone genius. This is the criticism that people say,
sort of, me as an ad researcher, I'm trying to create what Nathan is trying to do.
So there's a brilliant series called True Noble. Yes, it's fantastic. Absolutely spectacular.
I mean, I mean, they got so many things brilliant or right. But one of the things,
again, the criticism there, they conflated lots of people into one character that represents
all nuclear scientists, Juana Komiak. It's a composite character that presents all scientists.
Is this the way you were thinking about that, or is it just simplifies the storytelling? How do
you think about the lone genius? Well, I'd say this. The series I'm doing at the moment is a critique
in part of the lone genius concept. So yes, I'm sort of oppositional and either agnostic or
atheistic about that as a concept. I mean, not entirely. Whether lone is the right word, broadly
isolated, but Newton clearly exists in a sort of bubble of himself, in some respects, so does
Shakespeare. Do you think we would have an iPhone without Steve Jobs? I mean, how much
contribution from a genius? Steve Jobs clearly isn't a lone genius because there's too many other
people in the sort of superstructure around him who are absolutely fundamental to that journey.
But you're saying Newton, but that's a scientific. So there's an engineering element to building Ava.
But just to say, what Ex Machina is really, it's a thought experiment. I mean, so it's a
construction of putting four people in a house. Nothing about Ex Machina adds up in all sorts of
ways in as much as that. Who built the machine parts? Did the people building the machine parts
know what they were creating? And how did they get there? And it's a thought experiment.
All right. So it doesn't stand up to scrutiny of that sort.
I don't think it's actually that interesting of a question, but it's brought up so often
that I had to ask it because that's exactly how I felt after a while. There's something about,
there was almost a, like I've watched your movie the first time, at least for the first
little while, in a defensive way. Like how dare this person try to step into the AI space
and try to beat Kubrick. That's the way I was thinking. Because it comes off as a movie that
really is going after the deep fundamental questions about AI. So there's a kind of a,
nerds do this, I guess, automatically searching for the flaws. And I do exactly the same.
I think in Nihilation and the other movie, I was be able to free myself from that much quicker
that it is a thought experiment. Who cares if there's batteries that don't run out,
right? Those kinds of questions. That's the whole point. But it's nevertheless something I wanted
to bring up. Yeah, it's a fair thing to bring up. For me, you hit on the lone genius thing.
For me, it was actually, people always said, X-Makina makes this big leap in terms of where
AI has got to and also what AI would look like if it got to that point. There's another one,
which is just robotics. I mean, look at the way Ava walks around a room. It's like, forget it,
building that. That's also got to be a very, very long way off. And if you did get there,
would it look anything like that? It's a thought experiment. Actually, I disagree with you. I
think the way, as a ballerina, Alicia Vikander, brilliant actress actor that moves around, that
we're very far away from creating that, but the way she moves around is exactly the definition
of perfection for a roboticist. It's smooth and efficient. So it is where we want to get, I believe.
So I hang out with a lot of human or robotics people. They love elegant, smooth motion like
that. That's their dream. So the way she moved is actually what I believe that would dream for
a robot to move. It might not be that useful to move that way, but that is the definition
of perfection in terms of movement. Drawing inspiration from real life. So for devs, for
X-Makina, look at characters like Elon Musk. What do you think about the various big technological
efforts of Elon Musk and others like him that he's involved with, such as Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink?
Do you see any of that technology potentially defining the future worlds you create in your work?
So Tesla is automation, SpaceX is space exploration, Neuralink is brain machine interface,
somehow merger of biological and electric systems.
I'm, in a way, I'm influenced by that almost by definition because that's the world I live in.
And this is the thing that's happening in that world. And I also feel supportive of it. So
I think amongst various things, Elon Musk has done, I'm almost sure he's done a very, very good
thing with Tesla for all of us. It's really kicked all the other car manufacturers in the face.
It's kicked the fossil fuel industry in the face and they needed kicking in the face and he's done
it. And so that's the world he's part of creating. And I live in that world, just bought a Tesla in
fact. And so does that play into whatever I then make in some ways? It does partly because I try
to be a writer who quite often filmmakers are in some ways fixated on the films they grew up with
and they sort of remake those films in some ways. I've always tried to avoid that. And so I look to
the real world to get inspiration and as much as possible sort of by living, I think. And so,
yeah, I'm sure. Which of the directions do you find most exciting? Space travel. Space travel. So
you haven't really explored space travel in your work. You've said something like, if you had
unlimited amount of money, I think on a Reddit AMA, that you would make like a multi-year series
space wars or something like that. So what is it that excites you about space exploration?
Well, because if we have any sort of long term future, it's that. It just simply is that if
energy and matter are linked up in the way we think they're linked up, we'll run out if we don't
move. So we've got to move. But also, how can we not? It's built into us to do it or die trying.
I was on Easter Island a few months ago, which is, as I'm sure you know, in the middle of the
Pacific and difficult for people to have got to, but they got there. And I did think a lot about
the way those boats must have set out into something like space. It was the ocean and how
sort of fundamental that was to the way we are. And it's the one that most excites me because
it's the one I want most to happen. It's the thing, it's the place where we could get to
as humans. Like in a way, I could live with us never really unlocking, fully unlocking the
nature of consciousness. I'd like to know, I'm really curious. But if we never leave the solar
system, and if we never get further out into this galaxy, or maybe even galaxies beyond our galaxy,
that would, that feels sad to me because it's so limiting.
Yeah, there's something hopeful and beautiful about reaching out any kind of exploration,
reaching out across Earth centuries ago and then reaching out into space.
So what do you think about colonization of Mars? So go to Mars. Does that excite you the
idea of a human being stepping foot on Mars? It does. It absolutely does. But in terms of what
would really excite me, it would be leaving the solar system in as much as that I just think,
I think we already know quite a lot about Mars. And, but yes, listen, if it happened,
that would be, I hope I say it in my lifetime. I really hope I say it in my lifetime. So it would
be a wonderful thing. Without giving anything away. But the series begins with the use of quantum
computers. The new series does begins with the use of quantum computers to simulate basic living
organisms. Or actually, I don't know if the quantum computers are used, but basic living
organisms are simulated on a screen. It's a really cool kind of demo. Yeah, that's right. They're
using, yes, they are using a quantum computer to simulate a nematode. Yeah.
So returning to our discussion of simulation or thinking of the universe as a computer,
do you think the universe is deterministic? Is there a free will?
So with the qualification of, what do I know? Because I'm a layman, right? A layperson.
But with big imagination. Thanks. With that qualification. Yep. I think the universe is
deterministic and I see absolutely, I cannot see how free will fits into that. So yes,
deterministic, no free will. That would be my position.
And how does that make you feel? It partly makes me feel that it's exactly in keeping with the
way these things tend to work out, which is that we have an incredibly strong sense that we do have
free will. And just as we have an incredibly strong sense that time is a constant and turns out,
probably not to be the case, or definitely in the case of time. But the problem I always have
with free will is that it gets, I can never seem to find the place where it is supposed to reside.
And yet you explore. Just a bit of very, very, but we have something we can call free will,
but it's not the thing that we think it is. But free will, so do you, what we call free will?
It's what we call it as the illusion of it. It's a subjective experience of the illusion.
Which is a useful thing to have. And it partly comes down to, although we live in a deterministic
universe, our brains are not very well equipped to fully determine the deterministic universe.
So we're constantly surprised and feel like we're making snap decisions based on
imperfect information. So that feels a lot like free will. It just isn't. That's my guess.
So in that sense, your sense is that you can unroll the universe forward or backward,
and you will see the same thing. And I mean, that notion...
Yeah, sort of, sort of. But yeah, sorry, go ahead. I mean, that notion is a bit
uncomfortable to think about. That you can roll it back and forward.
If you were able to do it, it would certainly have to be a quantum computer,
something that worked in a quantum mechanical way in order to understand a quantum mechanical system.
I guess. And so that unrolling, there might be a multi-verse thing,
where there's a bunch of branching. Well, exactly, because it wouldn't follow
that every time you roll it back or forward, you'd get exactly the same result.
Which is another thing that's hard to wrap my hand around.
Yeah, but essentially what you just described, that yes forwards and yes backwards,
but you might get a slightly different result, or a very different result.
Or very different. Along the same lines, you've explored some really deep scientific ideas
in this new series. And I mean, just in general, you're unafraid to ground yourself in some of
the most amazing scientific ideas of our time. What are the things you've learned,
or ideas you find beautiful, mysterious about quantum mechanics,
multiverse, string theory, quantum computing that you've learned?
Well, I would have to say every single thing I've learned is beautiful. And one of the motivators
for me is that I think that people tend not to see scientific thinking as being essentially poetic
and lyrical. But I think that is literally exactly what it is. And I think the idea of
entanglement, or the idea of superpositions, or the fact that you could even demonstrate a super
position or have a machine that relies on the existence of superpositions in order to function,
to me is almost indescribably beautiful. It fills me with awe. It fills me with awe.
And also, it's not just a sort of grand, massive awe. But it's also delicate. It's very, very
delicate and subtle. And it has these beautiful sort of nuances in it, and also these completely
paradigm-changing thoughts and truths. So it's as good as it gets, as far as I can tell. So
broadly, everything. That doesn't mean I believe everything I read in quantum physics,
because obviously, a lot of the interpretations are completely in conflict with each other. And
who knows whether string theory will turn out to be a good description or not. But the beauty in
it, it seems undeniable. And I do wish people more readily understood how beautiful and poetic
science is, I would say. Science is poetry. In terms of quantum computing, being used
to simulate things, or just in general, the idea of simulating small parts of our world,
which actually current physicists are really excited about simulating small quantum mechanical
systems on quantum computers, but scaling that up to something bigger, like simulating lifeforms.
How do you think, what are the possible trajectories of that going wrong or going right
if you unroll that into the future? Well, if a bit like Ava and her robotics,
you park the sheer complexity of what you're trying to do. The issues are, I think it will
have a profound... If you were able to have a machine that was able to project forwards and
backwards accurately, it would in an empirical way show, it would demonstrate that you don't have
free will. So the first thing that would happen is people would have to really take on a very,
very different idea of what they were. The thing that they truly, truly believe they are,
they are not. And so that, I suspect, would be very, very disturbing to a lot of people.
Do you think that has a positive or negative effect on society, the realization that you
are not... You cannot control your actions, essentially, I guess, is the way that could be
interpreted? Yeah. Although, in some ways, we instinctively understand that already, because
in the example I gave you of the kid in the stabbing, we would all understand that that kid
was not really fully in control of their actions. So it's not an idea that's entirely alien to us.
But... I don't know we understand that. I think there's a bunch of people who see the world that
way, but not everybody. Yes, true. Of course, true. But what this machine would do is prove it
beyond any doubt, because someone would say, well, I don't believe that's true. And then you'd
predict, well, in 10 seconds, you're going to do this. And they'd say, no, no, I'm not. And then
they'd do it. And then determinism would have played its part. But I... Or something like that.
But actually, the exact terms of that thought experiment probably wouldn't play out. But
still, broadly speaking, you could predict something happening in another room, sort of unseen,
I suppose, that foreknowledge would not allow you to affect. So what effect would that have?
I think people would find it very disturbing. But then after they'd got over their sense of
being disturbed. Which, by the way, I don't even think you need a machine to take this idea on
board. But after they've got over that, they'd still understand that even though I have no free
will and my actions are, in effect, already determined, I still feel things. I still care
about stuff. I remember my daughter saying to me, she'd got hold of the idea that my view of the
universe made it meaningless. And she said, well, then it's meaningless. And I said, well, I can
prove it's not meaningless, because you mean something to me and I mean something to you. So
it's not completely meaningless, because there is a bit of meaning contained within this space. And
so with a lack of free will space, you could think, well, this robs me of everything I am. And
then you'd say, well, no, it doesn't, because you still like eating cheeseburgers, and you still
like going to see the movies. And so how big a difference does it really make? But I think
initially people would find it very disturbing. I think that what would come, if you could
really unlock with a determinism machine, everything, there'd be this wonderful wisdom
that would come from it. And I'd rather have that than not.
So that's a really good example of a technology revealing to us humans something fundamental
about our world, about our society. So it's almost this creation is helping us understand
ourselves in the same to be said about artificial intelligence. So what do you think
us creating something like Ava will help us understand about ourselves? How will that change
society? Well, I would hope it would teach us some humility. Humans are very big on exceptionalism,
you know, America is constantly proclaiming itself to be the greatest nation on earth,
which it may feel like that if you're an American, but it may not feel like that if you're from
Finland, because there's all sorts of things you dearly love about Finland. And exceptionalism
is usually bullshit, probably not always. If we both sat here, we could find a good example
of something that isn't, but as a rule of thumb. And what it would do is it would teach us some
humility and about, you know, actually often that's what science does in a funny way. It makes us
more and more interesting, but it makes us a smaller and smaller part of the thing that's
interesting. And I don't mind that humility at all. I don't think it's a bad thing. Our excesses
don't tend to come from humility. You know, our excesses come from the opposite megalomania
and stuff. We tend to think of consciousness as having some form of exceptionalism attached
to it. I suspect if we ever unravel it, it will turn out to be less than we thought in a way.
And perhaps your very own exceptionalist assertion earlier on in our conversation that
consciousness is something that belongs to us humans or not humans, but living organisms,
maybe you will one day find out that consciousness is in everything. And that will humble you.
If that was true, it would certainly humble me, although maybe almost maybe, I don't know,
I don't know what effect that would have. I mean, my understanding of that principle
is along the lines of say that an electron has a preferred state or it may or may not pass through
a bit of glass, it may reflect off or it may go through or something like that. And so that feels
as if a choice has been made. But if I'm going down the fully deterministic route,
I would say there's just an underlying determinism that has defined that,
that is defined the preferred state or the reflection or non-reflection. So,
but look, yeah, you're right. If it turned out that there was a thing that it was like to be
the sun, then I would, I'd be amazed and humbled and I'd be happy to be both. That sounds pretty
cool. And it'll be, you'll say the same thing as you said to your daughter, but it's nevertheless
feels something like to be me and that's pretty damn good. Yeah. So, Kubrick created many master
pieces, including The Shining, Dr. Strange Love, Clockwork Orange. But to me, he will be remembered,
I think, to many 100 years from now, for 2001, in space, honestly. I would say that's his greatest
film. I agree. You are incredibly humble. I've listened to a bunch of your interviews and I
really appreciate that you're humble in your creative efforts and your work. But if I were to
force you a gunpoint. Do you have a gun? You don't know that. The mystery is to imagine 100 years
out into the future. What will Alex Carlin be remembered for from something you've created
already or feel you may feel somewhere deep inside you may still create? Well, okay. Well,
I'll take, I'll take the question in the spirit it was asked, but very generous. Gunpoint.
Yeah. What I try to do, so therefore, what I hope,
yeah, if I'm remembered what I might be remembered for, is as someone who participates in a conversation.
And I think that often what happens is people don't participate in conversations. They make
proclamations. They make statements and people can either react against the statement or can fall
in line behind it. And I don't like that. So I want to be part of a conversation. I take as a sort
of basic principle, I think I take lots of my cues from science, but one of the best ones it seems
to me is that when a scientist has something proved wrong that they previously believed in,
they then have to abandon that position. So I'd like to be someone who is allied to that sort
of thinking. So part of an exchange of ideas and the exchange of ideas for me is something like
people in your world show me things about how the world work. And then I say, this is how I feel
about what you've told me. And then other people can react to that. And it's not,
it's not to say this is how the world is. It's just to say it is interesting to think about
the world in this way. And the conversation is one of the things I'm really hopeful about in your
works. The conversation you're having is with the viewer in the sense that you are bringing back
you and several others, but you very much so sort of intellectual depth to cinema,
to now series, sort of allowing film to be something that sparks a conversation,
is a conversation, lets people think, allows them to think.
But also, it's very important for me that if that conversation is going to be a good conversation,
what that must involve is that someone like you who understands AI, and I imagine understands
a lot about quantum mechanics, if they then watch the narrative feels, yes, this is a fair account.
So it is a worthy addition to the conversation. That for me is hugely important. I'm not interested
in getting that stuff wrong. I'm only interested in trying to get it right.
Alex, it was truly an honor to talk to you. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed it.
Thanks. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Thanks, man.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Alex Garland and thank you to our
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Podcast, support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman. And now,
let me leave you with a question from Ava, the central artificial intelligence character in the
movie X Machina that she asked during her Turing test. What will happen to me if I fail your test?
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.